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The Judaic heritage: A key to understanding the works of Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine

Gross, Eva Elizabeth, M.A.

The American University, 1993

UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with with permission permission of the of copyright the copyright owner. owner.Further reproduction Further reproduction prohibited without prohibited permission. without permission. THE JUDAIC HERITAGE: A KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE WORKS OF

MARC CHAGALL AND CHAIM SOUTINE

by

Eva E. Gross

submitted to the

Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences

of The American University

in Partial Fulfillment of

the Requirements for the Degree

of

Master of Arts

in

Performing Arts: Arts Management

Signatures of Committee:

Chai

/ / gjjJL Dean ofthe College

Date 1993 The American University Washington, D.C. 20016

the zhjzica.: UiiZTSEsm lierapz

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE JUDAIC HERITAGE: A KEY TO UNDERSTANDING THE WORKS OF MARC CHAGALL AND CHAIM SOUTINE BY EVA E. GROSS ABSTRACT

The paintings created by Marc Chagaii and Chaim Soutine cannot be fully understood without placing them in the context of their Judaic heritage. In the past, art historians have focused on the formal qualities of their art, and not the context in which they were created, thereby overlooking the foundation of their art. Both painters recreated Judaic rituals and laws through their art. Chagall portrayed his heritage lovingly, and created whimsical paintings of Judaic traditions. Soutine rebelled against his heritage, and chose to paint subjects that were strictly forbidden by Mosaic laws. By studying the biographies of both artists, analyzing the symbolism in over one hundred paintings, and relating these works to specific periods in the artists' lives, the author found their art to be imbued with Judaic symbolism. Therefore, the content of their work relied heavily on Judaic culture, and cannot be understood without some knowledge of their heritage.

ii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT...... ii

Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1 2. MARC CHAGALL: BACKGROUND AND ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT...... 6 3. ANALYSIS OF JUDAIC IMAGERY IN SELECTED PAINTINGS BY MARC CHAGALL...... 25 4. CHAIM SOUTINE: BACKGROUND AND ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT...... 40 5. ANALYSIS OF JUDAIC IMAGERY IN SELECETD PAINTINGS BY CHAIM SOUTINE...... 48 6. CONCLUSION...... 59 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 62

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

A work of art can never truly be understood without an awareness of the cultural aspects, historical relations, and personal elements that it contains.1 In recent years, there has been a tendency for art historians to view art objects for their formal qualities: color, line and form, and not the context in which they were created, therefore denying the individual and cultural experiences that are central to the creative process. There has been a claim by art critics such as H. H. Arnason, Helen Gardner and Herschel Chipp that modern art is built on the aesthetic precedents of other works of art, and that its formal problems grow out of older formal problems.2 We have, therefore, been conditioned to overlook the relations and tensions between the artist and his/her background, culture, sources and concerns. Pincus-Witten, the author of Eye to Eve: Twenty Years of Art Criticism, stresses that conventional art history has dismissed the tension between art's social and personal properties and its strictly formal or artistic properties.3 Edmund Feldman, the author of Varieties of Visual Experience, states that art criticism should be:

^vram Kampf, Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century (South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey Publishers, Inc., 1984), 7. 2H. H. Arnason, Helen Gardner and Herschel Chipp have made statements in their books History of Modern Art. Art. Through the Ages and Theories of Modern Art. respectively that the arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture are arts of formal qualities: color, line and form, and for that reason it is essential to approach these arts in the twentieth century, or in any other period, strictly through an analysis of the artist's attitude toward these qualities, and through the relation that these arts bear to the works of art of earlier periods. 3Robert Pincus-Witten, Eve to Eve: Twenty Years of Art Criticism (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1984), 3. 1

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 the sharing of discoveries about life, where art has its beginnings.4 This view emphasizes the fact that the conventional focus on the formal qualities of art diminishes the ability to fully understanding the content.5 Therefore, there is a need to acknowledge, develop and expand the accepted mode of art criticism to place works of art in their correct cultural context, thereby enriching artistic knowledge, and encouraging greater participation in the sharing of cultural experience. This thesis will focus on the cultural heritage shared, intensified, and transformed by Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine, both Orthodox Jewish artists, and will illuminate the context of their work, a context which has been largely ignored by contemporary art historians, managers and critics.6 Their art will be analyzed in the context of the ancient, potent and resilient culture of Judaism, which is still undergoing vital transformation. Failure to recognize the expression of a specific Jewish experience in twentieth-century art stems largely from a prejudice of modern historiography which "studies history in terms of nation states and often ignores the strength of the culture in Europe whose history is not bounded by political geography."7 The culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe transcended political borders, so that Jews of Poland, Lithuania, Romania, the Ukraine, and other nation states shared a pervasive identity and language, and had more in common with one another than they did with the ethnic majorities of the countries in which they lived. From the late nineteenth century the culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe spread across the world, and they sustained their ties through their common religious traditions, their ways of thinking and feeling, their language, and their unique historical consciousness.

4Doug Blandy and Dristin Congdon, Pluralistic Approaches to Art Criticism (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991), 1. 5 Kampf, 8. 6Ibid., 10. 7 Ib id .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. This cultural tie is evident in the paintings of Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Since World War I, they have occupied an important place among contemporary artists. Their influence and authority have been steadily increasing.8 One of the consequences of their success has been a need for change in the critical presentation and interpretation of their work. Until a few years ago, most historians and critics were satisfied with analyzing their art based on its overt visual qualities.9 What is needed today is an understanding of Chagall's and Soutine's works in their entirety, based on a comprehensive presentation which explores the Judaic cultural context of their art. The conception of Jewish Art might appear to be in a contradiction in terms. There is a widespread impression that, in the past, visual art was made impossible among Orthodox Jews such as Chagall and Soutine by the uncompromising prohibition in the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth."10 King Solomon, in The Old Testament, condemned painting as follows:

the sight whereof entices fools to lust after it, and so they desire the form of a dead image, that hath no breath...they that make them, they that desire them, and they that worship them, are lovers of evil thing....11

These injunctions have often been loosely interpreted, but in the case of Orthodox Jews, the result was that visual art was not an acceptable form of expression. Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine, having grown up in Orthodox Jewish communities, were taught from an early age

8Ibid., 91. 9Ibid„ 10. 10Exodus 20:2. 1 Wisdom of Solomon 15:5.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. that no visual representation whatsoever, of man, beast, or bird, was permissible.12 Jews, up until the nineteenth century, lacked achievement in the visual arts. Compared with the record of the Egyptians, Greeks and the Romans, there seems to be no notable Hebrew creations in sculpture, painting or architecture.13 Jewish decoration and domestic articles were not on par with the aesthetic ambiance created, for example, by the French or English.14 The appearance of a large number of outstanding Jewish painters in the twentieth-century has been attributed to significant changes in society that allowed for more freedom and mobility within Jewish communities.15 Jewish communities had been subjected to grave limitations imposed upon them both by their own faith and by the instability of their political and economic status. At the turn of the century, the old order was questioned on many levels: economic, political and social. In Russia, the birth place of Chagall and Soutine, unrest and discontent culminated in the revolutionary attempt to overthrow the Czarist regime in 1905.16 Although not successful, it permanently put in motion the forces of change that penetrated the dismal and stifling boundaries of the ghetto. The more adventuresome began to explore opportunities never dreamed of by their parents and grandparents. For Marc Chagall this meant seeking a freer environment in St. Petersburg where he could pursue his passion for painting, a vocation frowned upon in the ghetto. From there it seemed logical for him to travel to Paris, a city which had always intrigued and attracted Russian intellectuals, and had become more accessible by railroad for the non-affluent.17

12Cecil Roth, Jewish Art: An Illustrated History (Greenwich, Conn: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971), 11. 13Ibid., 13. 14 I b id . 15Ibid., 229. 15Kampf, 16. 17Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall (New York: Harry Abrams, Ind., 1961), 95.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Chaim Soutine was forbidden to paint in his village. When he attempted to do so he was severely punished by his parents.18 He decided, nevertheless, to pursue painting and traveled first to Minsk, Vilna and, finally, to Paris, a city he had read about as the center of aesthetic innovation.19 For both Chagall and Soutine, the winds of change in Europe gave them possibilities unheard of before in the ghetto. Like many others of their generation, they were powerfully attracted by the art, science and technology of the Western world. According to Avram Kampf, the author of Jewish Experience in the Art of the Twentieth Century, they broke out of the confines of the ghetto and "crossed the river or climbed the fence which physically or symbolically encircled many of the Jewish towns and separated them from the rest of the world".20 But although they ran away from the religious traditions that suppressed their artistic ambitions, it was these traditions that imbued their paintings with Judaic symbolism and imagery. The following chapters analyze their Judaic backgrounds and the relationship of their paintings to their cultural heritage. From this non-visual background grew the artists Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine. Within the communities in which they were raised, Jewish ritual and folklore was the center of existence, and thus became the source of their inspiration.

18Maurice Tuchman, Chaim Soutine (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1968), 7. 19Tuchman, 15. 20Kampf, 12.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 2 MARC CHAGALL: BACKGROUND AND ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT

Marc Chagall was bom into a large and poor Jewish family on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia.21 He was born at a time when Vitebsk was passing through a phase of rapid development. Its river port and railway junction made it an important trading center, and a number of small industries had established themselves there. Jews were not allowed to settle in St. Petersburg or Moscow, but only within rural areas. They needed special permits to live in large cities; these permits were granted mainly to Jews who were involved in the improvement of the Russian economy: bankers, lumber dealers, factory owners, railroad builders. From time to time, even these Jews were expelled and sent to live with all the other Jews in the crowded region known as the Pale of Settlement, which consisted of twenty-five provinces from the Black Sea to the Baltic, an area of almost a million square miles where Jews formed about one-ninth of the total population.22 Among the finest and most impressive buildings of Vitebsk were thirty churches, including the cathedral and the church of the Resurrection, erected in the fifteenth century. Vitebsk also had some sixty synagogues and Jewish teaching establishments. Each of the congregations had approximately 500 members.23 Most of the structures were archaic, bare, simple; a few had second stories, carved towers, and outside galleries. Some of the synagogues were built like fortresses with heavy gates so that Jews might take refuge

21Sidney Alexander, Marc Chagall: An Intimate Biography (New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1978), 17. 22Chaim Potok, Wanderings: Chaim Potok's History of the Jews (New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1978), 495. 23 Alexander, 18. 6

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 7 in the house of God away from the constant wave of pograms which had left thousands of Jewish families without a livelihood.24 Only six hundred and fifty out of the eight thousand houses were made of stone.25 The rest were the wooden structures that Chagall depicted later in his paintings. Jewish men wore ritual fringes and traditional caftans and fur-trimmed hats. The women wore long skirts, long sleeves, high buttoned collars and wigs, in accordance with a religious prescription to shave their hair at marriage so that they not be attractive to other men. The town was usually a peaceful area, but occasionally a wave of pograms would disrupt daily life. In Vitebsk, Jews were especially prominent in manufacturing; extensive trade was carried on by Jewish merchants with Latvia and other foreign countries. Chief articles of export were breadstuffs, flax, hemp, beet sugar and timber.26 Farm animals were everywhere: chickens, geese, ducks, cats, dogs, goats and cows. Jewish families in the shtetl kept pets, usually cats, bestowing on them affectionate Jewish names and speaking to them in Yiddish.27 Dogs were considered non-Jewish because they had been used by anti-semites to scare Jews during raids of the villages.28 Most knowledge of Chagall's family is derived from his autobiography My Life, written in 1921 when he was thirty four years old. My Life tells little about the actual facts of his life, but a lot about the personality of the man. It has the same feel as his painted surfaces; it is a series of written images, individual and highly colored. My Life contains written portraits of his father and mother and characterizations of various uncles, aunts, and grandparents.

24Pograms were government approved attacks on the Jewish population with the object of terrorizing and expelling the Jews which usually resulted in masacres of large numbers of the population. 25Alexander, 19. 2 6Ibid., 18. 27Shtetl is a Yiddish word that means "small town". 28Tuchman, 13.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 8 Chagall’s parents, like most of the Jews in Vitebsk, were Hasidim, a sect founded in Poland in the middle of the eighteenth century which had won over a large segment of the Jewish population of eastern Europe.29 Hasidism is linked to the wisdom of the Cabala, a mystic interpretation of the Bible. For the Hasid, spontaneous emotion is as important as law or ritual, for it is believed that the observance of the Commandments is less important to God than the emotion that accompanies this ritual. The truly pious man experiences God in the most mundane of acts- eating, drinking, and even sexual intercourse. The fulfillment of a single commandment, performed with love and intense devotion, is sufficient to bring a man merit. Working hard for a living and laboring for material gain are acts of value, for they supply the Hasid with sustenance and help to bring happiness into his daily life. Common to all Hasidic communities is the unique role of the rebbe, the tzaddik (wise) one, the sacred leader around whom all activity is centered. The tzaddik is the pure soui of the community’s collective being, passionately loved and blindly followed. He is the individual's link with God. He is to his followers a teacher, moralist, preacher, confessor and miracle worker. But it is not only the tzaddik, who has the time and opportunity for long studies, who can come to know God. Richness of the heart can surpass all science and piety. The weak man, too, perhaps especially, has the right to a Divine answer.30 Chagall's father, Zahkar, worked his whole life in the same job as a packer in a herring pickling plant. Day after day he dragged heavy barrels of herrings about the warehouse. Chagall's father's life was an object lesson in drudgery that Marc Chagall never forgot. On the rare occasions when his father spoke to him, it was to give him advice or to indicate a religious passage he ought to read. Otherwise, Chagall’s father hardly said a word to his children.31

29Meyer, 15 30Ibid., 16. 31 Ibid., 23.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 9 His father's life filled Chagall's heart with tenderness and pity. In an interview with Andre Parinaud, who recorded Chagall's recollections on tape, he confided:

One thing shocked me: my father's life of poverty with nine children, earning twenty rubles a month. For thirty-two years, as an ordinary laborer, he carried barrels of herring. His clothes were wet with brine, his hands frozen. But his eyes still reflected his soul. Everything about him was gentle, sad, gray. He was always tired and worried. When I would see him fall asleep in the evening from sheer exhaustion, I said to myself, He is miserable. And I thought, I will never ask a cent from this man who works with his hands. I shall never ask him to give me anything.32

Chagall's mother, Feiga-Ita, was his father's distant cousin, the eldest daughter of a kosher butcher. (The dietary concept of koshering food is a process by which an animal is killed as quickly, cleanly and painlessly as possible, accompanied by an appropriate prayer. All of the excess blood is immediately removed, and the meat is eaten as soon as possible.) Chagall's mother was bustling and sociable, always on the move. Even with her nine children, she managed a small shop where she sold herring, flour, sugar and spices. She also built small houses to rent near the family home in order to augment the family income. Between Chagall's father's and mother's income, the family managed not to live in poverty.33 Of all of Chagall's relatives, he most adored his maternal grandfather, the butcher from Lyozno, with whom he spent his vacations.34 His grandfather, lazy by nature and prone to spend hours sitting by his stove, was eccentric as well. For example, in good

32Jean Paul Crespelle, Chagall (New York: Coward-McCann, 1970), 46. 33Meyer, 23. 34Alexander, 35.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 0 weather he climbed the roof of his house, taking sunbaths, eating apricots and gorging himself with carrots. This was the best vantage point from which to watch fires, of which there were many in the wood-built town.35 The little village of Vitebsk offered Chagall the sense of security that only a Jewish town could offer its Jewish citizens. Everywhere else in czarist Russia, a Jew was a more or less tolerated alien, not merely by law but by custom. It was only in the enclave of the shtetl, on whose way of life the Jewish spirit and Jewish customs had put their stamp for centuries, that the world was not hostile. Chagall began his formal education with local Rabbis, learning reading and numbers from one, while another taught him the Scriptures. When he was eight he began studying at the Cheder, the Jewish communal school, where he continued for seven or eight years. He spoke of his teachers there as follows: Rabbi Ohre, the rabbi from Mogilev, who looked "as if he had jumped out of one of my pictures or had run away from a circus"36 and Djatkine; Rabbi Djatkine was a capable teacher, a man of culture with broad, modern views. For example, he did not have a beard which indicated that he was a very modern man.37 During the course of his childhood, Chagall was infused with the world of the Bible. He studied the Talmud ( a collection of texts and commentaries on Jewish religious law) and learned the drosche (sermons), which he was able to recite by heart for his parents. He also took singing and violin lessons and acted as helper to the Cantor in the synagogue. At this time, his dream was to be a great singer or violinist, anything to escape the drudgery and toil of a job like his father's.38 Chagall was fortunate that the conditions governing his schooling and the choice of an occupation were no longer those in force when his father had been a boy. From 1825-1855, the time

35Ib id . 3 6 Meyer, 41. 37Ibid., 41. 3®Ibid., 62.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 11 when Chagall's father was growing up, Nicholas I, czar of Russia, had instituted a forced draft of young Jews into the Russian army. Any Jewish child from the age of twelve to twenty-five was taken into the military. This law applied to all Jewish communities of Lithuania and the Ukraine. Each community was given a quota. Jewish parents would falsify birth records, conceal their children, or even maim them so they would not pass the army physical examination.39 Jews responsible for filling the quotas would be forced to resort to helping the military police who would snatch the children - to the accompaniment of screams of parents and neighbors. Some of these children were never seen again. It was a time of horror.40 For Chagall's generation, the oppression of the Russian Jews had become far less horrific. This can be clearly seen from the Jews’ attitude to the Russian language. It was only in extremely Orthodox circles that it was considered a sacrilege to speak Russian, as had formerly been the case. Although Chagall and his brother and sisters still spoke Yiddish with their parents, among themselves and in the street they spoke Russian. And it is significant that the family had changed their name from Segal, a common Jewish name, to Chagall.41 This attitude opened the way to schooling that offered the children more advanced studies. Chagall’s father, on finishing the Cheder, had been apprenticed to Jachnine, the herring dealer. His wife had been acquired for him by a marriage broker and the children had arrived one after the other. Chagall’s father's work and his miserable salary of twenty rubles a month remained unchanged.42 On the other hand, Chagall was sent to public school after leaving the Cheder where lessons were taught in Russian. Chagall was not a good student. Although he pored over his books, he could not learn much except for geometry and drawing: "Lines, angles, triangles, squares carried me far away to enchanting horizons. And during those hours of drawing I only lacked a throne.

39Ibid, 41. 40Potok, 496. 41 M eyer, 21. 42A rubel was worth approximately 50 cents.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 2 I was the center of the class, the object of attention and example to all."43 Extra-curricular drawing lessons at his school had a far- reaching effect. He began to go to the library to copy portraits. A school friend who saw those portraits on the wall of his room exclaimed "You're a real artist, aren't you?"44 Chagall had never heard a word as fantastic or as literary as the word "artist". "Yes, perhaps I had heard it, but in my town no one ever pronounced it. It was so far removed from us! On my own initiative I'd never have dared use that word."45 Chagall had found his calling. That the word "artist" was such a surprising sound for him may have been due to the stigma attached to Jewish artists. As opposed to the Jewish painters of the late nineteenth century i.e. Camille Pissarro, Max Lieberman, Jozef Israels, Isaak Levitan - who kept their Jewish identity hidden46, Chagall was open about, and proud of, his heritage. In the environment where he grew up, it had been considered revolutionary to paint a picture. The only works of graphic art seen in Vitebsk, even in the homes of wealthy Jews, were lithographs portraying religious personalities or representing Jewish festivals.47 His mother had showed astonishing courage when she had yielded to her son's pressure and took him to visit the studio of the painter Jehuda Pen where he faced his first encounter with "official art". Pen had established himself in Vitebsk after studying at the St. Petersburg Academy. He specialized in genre pictures and portraits in the style of the official Salon artists, the Peredvischnike (Society for Traveling Exhibitions). The motifs Pen chose conformed with the current style of Realism- peasants working in the fields, water carriers, and old women.48

43Marc Chagall, Mv Life (New York: The Orion Press, 1960), 51. 44Meyer, 42. 45Chagall, 53. 46Norma Broude, World Impressionism: The International Movement. 1860- 1920 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990),371. 47Meyer, 43. 4 8 Ib id .

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 13 Pen may have had little to teach Chagall, but understood him quickly. Instead of making Chagall pay for lessons, Pen allowed him to work unsupervised in his studio. Chagall was already absorbed in recreating the images that began to obsess him. His surviving drawings of this period show working-class people. Violinists, a favorite future subject, appeared. He began painting in sharp, vivid colors instead of the muted shades that were commonly accepted at that time. His work, even at this early stage, was characterized by an anti-realist quality. According to Franz Meyer, the author of an exhaustive biography on Chagall, his clumsy drawing of anatomy and of perspective were a declaration of independence from Pen's style of painting.49 Chagall only stayed with Pen for ten weeks but his lessons enabled him to incorporate the means used by traditional painters with his own. During this time, he also worked as a retoucher at a local photographer's shop, which he disliked intensely.50 One of the most important developments during this period of Chagall's life was his friendship with Victor Mekler, a schoolmate who came from an affluent Jewish family. Mekler had wanted to become an artist; after finishing school, he also attended Pen's classes, along with Chagall. He sensed Chagall's gift at painting and asked Chagall to give him lessons. Chagall accepted, but did not ask a fee.51 He considered Mekler to be a gifted amateur, and Mekler was important for Chagall as a link with the cultivated world of the upper middle class. It was through him that Chagall met, somewhat later, Bella Rosenfeld, his future wife.52 It was also Mekler who encouraged Chagall to move to St. Petersburg. For years Chagall had suffered from the cramped environment of Vitebsk and was painfully aware of the limits of what he could learn from Pen.53 What he urgently needed was to be able to draw and paint freely.

49Ibid„ 47. 50Ibid., 49. 5 1 I b id . 5 2 Ib id . 53Ibid., 50.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 14 But, at that time, he found the notion of leaving Vitebsk and traveling to the capital inconceivable.54 Mekler's enthusiasm helped him to conquer his inhibitions and take his first step outside of Vitebsk into the world.55 In 1906, Mekler and Chagall traveled together to St. Petersburg.56 Life there was hard at first. The money that Chagall's father had flung on the table with the words "this is the last I can give you"57 did not go very far. For the first few months, Chagall worked as a retoucher for a photographer as he had in Vitebsk. Pen recommended him for the job.58 He then tried to become a sign painter; he did an apprenticeship but failed to pass the final examination.59 Sign painting became a skill that he would utilize on many occasions thereafter. As he wrote in My Life:

I took a passionate interest in those signs and did a whole series of them. I liked to see my signs swinging in the market place above the entrance to a butcher shop or fruit shop, and near them a pig or a chicken tenderly scratching itself, while wind and rain, unconcerned, splashed them with mud.60

Finally, Chagall turned to St. Petersburg sculptor, I. S. Ginsburg, for help to overcome his money problems.61 I. S. Ginsburg gave him a letter of recommendation to Baron David Ginsburg, a patron of the arts who supplied him a monthly allowance of ten rubles for four months.62

5 4 Ib id . 5 5 Ib id . 5 6 Ibid. 5 7 Ib id . 5 8 Ib id . 5 9 Ibid. 60Chagall, Mv Life. 85. 61Crespelle,73. 62Meyer, 50.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 15 During this period, Chagall had to make do with terrible accommodations. "My means did not permit me to rent a room; I was forced to content myself with nooks and alcoves. I didn't even have a bed to myself, I had to share it with a workman."63 Malnourished, Chagall had frequent fainting fits.64 St. Petersburg had been his first real experience outside a protective Jewish environment. As a Jew, he needed a special permit to live in there. Professionals and the domestic servants and manual laborers in their employ, could obtain this permit with some difficulty. Chagall's father had asked a friend of his to make out a certificate stating that Chagall was commissioned to fetch goods for his father in St. Petersburg. The limited permit was only valid for a few months and was not renewable. One day on his way back from Vitebsk Chagall tried to enter the city without a pass. As a result, he was put in prison for two weeks.65 Chagall was rescued by a patron of the arts, a Jewish lawyer named Goldberg, who had no difficulty in obtaining a residence permit for his Jewish servants as long as they dwelt and ate in his house. He employed Chagall as a footman and lived in a tiny cubbyhole under the stairs. His relations with the family were friendly; they even bought some of the paintings he did at the tim e.66 Chagall had come to St. Petersburg to advance his knowledge about art. But he was not allowed to attend the official Academy because that required a high school diploma. Instead, he applied to Baron Stieglitz's school of applied art which, like the Academy, gave its pupils a permit to live in the city. Chagall took the entrance examination in 1906.67 The exam included copying a plaster cast and a stem of vine with a bunch of grapes and leaves. Chagall was convinced that studies from these casts were chosen purposely to

63Chagall, 81. 64Meyer, 50. 65 I b id . 6 6 Ib id . 67Ibid., 52.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 6 frighten off Jewish students so they could not obtain authorization.68 At any rate, he failed the exam because his drawing was considered far too "impressionistic" to satisfy the rigorous academic standards. After his failure, he enrolled in a school sponsored by the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, where he went directly into the third year without an entrance examination. This school aimed at supplementing the large arts schools and received subsidies for students who could not attend the Academy because they lacked the required school certificates. The curriculum included three classes; the pupils first drew still lifes, then figures from plaster casts, and finally from a live model. Chagall's work attracted attention and he was awarded a school fee of six rubles. In 1907 he was granted a scholarship of 15 rubles a month for a year.69 Despite awards, Chagall was dissatisfied. He was criticized on every possible occasion by his teachers because his work was so radically different. In 1908, he lost his self confidence and left the school without bothering to collect the last month of his scholarship.70 St. Petersburg had turned out to be another form of repression, not the liberal education he had hoped for. In a final attempt to salvage his formal artistic education, Chagall left St. Petersburg and entered the Svanseva School in Moscow, which had been founded in 1899 as an anti-academic art school and was more modern than any other art school in Russia. At the Svanseva School, the program included hours of painting and drawing from a model or from memory according to the day of the w eek .71 His primary teacher was Leon Bakst. Bakst was at the height of his career. He had just returned from Paris where he had worked with the Ballets Russes troupe. His gift was stage design. His sets for Scheherazade and The Fire Bird had received acclaim in

68Alexander, 60. 69Meyer, 52. 70Ib id . 71 Ibid., 59.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 17 Paris. As Chagall's teacher, he encouraged the young student’s use of symbolism and insisted on the essential importance of color.72 At this point in Chagall's artistic development, the characteristic qualities of his painting began to appear: a disdain of realism, a dreamlike atmosphere, folk themes, and shimmering colors. Chagall was learning to make use of his own vocabulary and to channel it into a coherent structure. In 1910 Chagall left Russia.73 Leon Bakst announced that he was leaving for Paris to work on the sets for the new season of the Ballets Russes. The news of his departure motivated Chagall, who had become convinced that there was no possibility for him to develop and express himself fully while remaining in Russia, which meant returning to Vitebsk and becoming a local painter like Jeduha Pen. Chagall asked Bakst to bring him to Paris as an assistant, however he did not successfully complete a trial sample and Bakst hired someone else. Chemio Vinaver, a lawyer whom Chagall had met at the Goldbergs' and had taken an interest in his work, financed his trip. Vinaver bought two paintings from Chagall and offered him an allowance of 125 francs a month.74 Chagall was grateful for Vinaver's generosity. In his memoirs he wrote: "My father sired me and Vinaver made me a painter. Without him, I would have perhaps remained a photographer, settled in Vitebsk, and never laid eyes on Paris."75 Vinaver subsidized Chagall until World War I and made several trips to Paris to look at his work. At first, life in Paris was difficult for Chagall, who was insecure and homesick.76 He made do with his allowance but often had to buy old pictures, which were cheaper than new canvases, and to paint over them. He attended two art schools - the Palette and the Grande Chaumiere. More influential, according to Chagall, was the light in the sky over Paris. He recalled -the surprise and sense of

7 2 Ib id . 73Ibid., 60. 74Ibid„ 95. 75Crespelle, 81. 76Meyer, 96.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 8 wonder of this light: "I was struck by the Paris light as soon as I got off the train. Then I began to understand color."77 The museums, private galleries and big salons in Paris provided him with a better education than any he could have received at the formal art schools.78 In Mv Life he wrote that he felt most at home at the Louvre and that he had the impression that the Old Masters whose works he studied there were "friends long vanished. Their prayers, mine."79 Among the painters that impressed him most were Manet, Delacroix, Rembrandt and Watteau.80 At the same time he studied the contemporary painters, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse. "Of Course" Chagall wrote "I was able to express myself in my far distant native town, in the circle of my friends. But I longed to see with my own eyes what I had heard about from far away.81 When Chagall arrived in Paris, a revolution in ways of seeing and painting was in full swing. Artists were experimenting with Cubism and Fauvism, both of which included theories and techniques designed to capture the essence of an artist's subject, not just its surface.82 This sudden explosion of new ideas had a radical affect on his painting. After a few months in Paris, Chagall became a painter who knew exactly what he wanted to do, who had his own style, and whose work already possessed a sharply defined character.83 Throughout the years that followed, there were variations, but the essence of his art remained unchanged. From the very beginning, his memories of Vitebsk and the Jewish life there conditioned his

77Crespelle, 82. 7 8 Ibid. 79Meyer, 96. 80Ibid. 8 1 Ibid. 82Cubism was founded by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1908. It included the process of simplifying forms into planes and assuming different viewpoints to create a new pictorial reality. Fauvism appeared in 1905 under the leadership of Henri Matisse who pioneered the movement by simplifying forms and bringing color to a new intensity. 83Meyer, 109.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 19 expression. He translated his memories on to canvas in a direct and straightforward manner. In 1912, Chagall moved to a studio in an artists’ settlement known as La Ruche located near the Vaugirard slaughterhouses.84 La Ruche was made up of 140 studios, so he was not living alone. But

by day and painted by night. He was driven by the urge to see and learn. "Paris, you are my second Vitebsk!"85, he exclaimed. Chagall made repeated efforts to show his works, but with little success. Finally, in 1914 he was given a chance at a one man exhibition in Berlin.86 He planned to go to Berlin for the opening of the exhibition and from there to take a short trip home to Russia. He meant to stay home for a short visit, but, while he was there, World War I broke out and it was impossible for him to leave the country. He found himself relegated back to the narrow, less glorious reality of his native town. While there, he painted some fifty "documents" of his family, the townsfolk and the town itself.87 Perhaps his most important personal experience in Vitebsk was his reunion with his long-time sweetheart, Bella, the daughter of a prosperous Vitebsk Jeweler. It was difficult for her to obtain permission from her family to see Chagall, considering their difference in social class and his "questionable" profession. Finally, he was allowed to marry her on July 25, 1915.88 Bella was to become a crucial source of ideas for Chagall, both as a subject and as a critic. He painted her for over thirty years. Chagall and his wife attempted to return to Paris in spite of the war, but that proved impossible. A deferment of military service he had obtained in St. Petersburg came to an end. As a painter he asked to work on camouflage duties. When his application was

84 Alexander, 118. 85Chagall, 116. 86Alexander, 167. 87Meyer, 217. 88Horst Keller, Marc Chagall: Life and Works (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's, 1980), 51.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 20 rejected, his brother-in-law, Jacov Rosenfeld, found him work in the war economy bureau which Rosenfeld directed. But Chagall proved totally unfit for office work and Jacov Rosenfeld employed him on minor staff problems or put him to work perusing the daily newspapers.89 Finally, as a way of filling his office hours, Chagall began his memoirs. He also developed a plan to create an art school in Vitebsk. He sent his plan to A. V. Lunacharsky, whom Lenin, on his accession to power, had named People's Commissar of Education and Culture in 1917.90. it had been Lunacharsky's dream to establish art schools and museums all over the Soviet Republic. On September 12, 1918, Chagall was named Commissar of Fine Arts for the Vitebsk region, in charge of creating an art's school, museum, and local theatre.91 This marked the beginning of two years of intense activity, conflicts, and bitter disappointments. Even before his official appointment, Chagall organized an exhibition of Vitebsk artists. He gave his former teacher, Jehuda Pen, an exclusive showing with some hundred of his works in the main hall of the exhibition building. For himself, he reserved a small room where he showed five paintings. Another room was devoted to four other Vitebsk painters of whom his old friend, Victor Mekler, was one.92 As Commissar, his plan was to set up an art's school and museum. He also planned for a yearly jury-free exhibition that never materialized.93 At the very start he was faced with a difficult task. Proceeding from orders, he began creating a school which would be known as the "academy". Six months after his nomination, he opened the doors to students.94 Difficulties arose soon after. For example, there was a constant lack of funds, jealousy between the

89Meyer, 243. 9°Ibid., 265. 91Crespelle, 131. 92Meyer, 265. 93Ibid. 94Ibid„ 266.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 1 teachers, and students who were rejected plotted against him. Kasmir Malevitch, the acknowledged leader of the Russian avant- garde, was called in to help manage the school, however, he and Chagall disagreed on every level. Chagall, entrusted with the architecture and graphic arts departments, had been involved with a form of folk art designed to rejuvenate popular Jewish art. Malevitch leaned toward a less realistic, revolutionary, and futuristic style of art known as Supremitism. It was not long before a fight between the two broke out. On Chagall's return from one of his frequent trips to Moscow to obtain financial assistance from the ministry for the school, he found that the inscription "Free Academy" over the door of the school had been changed to "Suprematist Academy." He immediately sent his resignation to the ministry and left Russia permanently in 1922.95 Obtaining a French visa, he returned to France after spending several months in Berlin trying to locate the paintings he had left there before the war. Unfortunately the paintings had all been sold.96 With these works lost, he began to reconstruct his past. He repainted his old pictures from memory and sketches. At this point in his career, his artistic development had come full circle. Russia was still spiritually and physically his native country. But Paris was his second home, a land of freedom where he was able to express and expand upon ideas that he had developed in Russia. He returned to the theme of his childhood memories over and over again. He discovered the pictorial possibilities of Jewish weddings and processions of musicians and rabbis clothed in Orthodox garb. He found his idiom, and, until his death in 1985, he expressed the ancient heritage of Jewish culture. From 1923 on, Chagall's personal life and his work flourished. Having previously led a life of poverty and struggle, he was now content and at home with his surroundings. He chose different places in France in which to work, and he felt a great

95Ibid., 272. 96Ibid., 277.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 22 affinity for the French countryside which had inspired so many painters before him.97 There he found a peaceful atmosphere, room to work, and an audience. He had opportunities to show his work in Paris and other European cities and later in New York as well. He received commissions from the famous art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard to illustrate Gogol’s Dead Souls. The Fables of La Fontaine, a series of circus illustrations, and finally, a commission for the illustration of the Old Testament.98 Thus, the period between World War I and World War II was spent, in large part, working on illustrations Late in the 1930's, however, Chagall experienced the double concerns of being an artist and a Jew. His works were denounced in Germany as examples of Bolshevik culture and were taken down from museum walls, some of them slashed and burned.99 Racial persecutions in Germany and the outbreak of war in Spain left an indelible stamp on his work. The subject matter of his paintings became more and more tragic, with Nazi persecutions and Polish pograms frequent themes: images of men fleeing wooden houses in flames took the place of lovers and flowering landscapes. Blacks, greens, and somber reds predominated. During this period, the Crucifix became his ultimate symbol of the Jewish man, sorrow, martyrdom and isolation.100 In 1940 Chagall moved to Gordes, and then to Marseilles to evade the German Occupation, but without success. He was arrested and only released after considerable difficulties.101 Finally he accepted an invitation to the United States from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He arrived with his family in New York just as the persecution of Jews in France began. In 1944, Bella died a tragic death. She became sick with a virus infection and was taken to a local hospital where, for lack of

97Ibid., 354. "Alexander, 272. "Crespelle, 213. 10°Meyer, 429. 101 Ibid., 433.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 23 proper care, she died within thirty six hours.102 Her death devastated Chagall. Bella had brought him serenity and had helped him bear the horrors of war. He did not pick up a brush for a year.103 He remained in the United States until 1948, and then returned to France for good, turning more and more to his themes of the past. In 1952 he married Valentina Brodsky (affectionately nicknamed Vava).104 At the age of fifty seven, he had found that in order to continue his work, he needed an intelligent, devoted person at his side.105 His marriage gave him new energy. With the encouragement of Vava, he began a new period of intensive creative activity which included, among other achievements, painting the ceiling of the Paris Opera House and the stained-glass windows for the cathedrals of Reims an Metz.106 Chagall continued to work on his same themes, experimenting with different materials: clay, glaze and tile in order to create pottery, ceramics and mosaics. He also accepted commissions to design stained glass windows. For example, in 1959 he completed one of his greatest works, the monumental windows for the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, Israel.107 Chagall had a successful career. He continued to work every day, transforming his memories into symbols and images, until he was ninety-seven years old.108 He had become the "grand old man" of French painting.109 Over the years, he was granted numerous awards, prizes, and honorary doctorates but he never forgot how far he had come: how he had started off as a poor Russian Jew, survived the persecutions of the wars, the holocaust, and his own personal

102Francois Le Target, Marc Chagall. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1985) 27. 103Alexander, 362. 104Meyer, 529. 105Alexander, 457. 106Ibid. 107Ibid., 463. 108Le Target, 29. 109Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 24 tragedies, and went on to create many large works in public buildings all over the world. As Chagall himself said: "Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being."110 Marc Chagall died of natural causes on March 28, 1885 in his house at Saint-Paul-de-Vence.111

110Rob McMullen, The World of Marc Chagall. (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1968) 263. J11Le Targat, 29.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 3 ANALYSIS OF JUDAIC IMAGERY IN SELECTED PAINTINGS BY MARC CHAGALL

Chagall's childhood memories of his Judaic upbringing and his life in Vitebsk animated his imagination throughout his career. He filled his paintings with images of his father, as a weary figure in a prayer shawl; his mother preparing the Sabbath meal, a menagerie of farm animals, and the ritual slaughtering of cows as prescribed by the Jewish dietary laws.112 His artistic development went through a series of distinct stages. In Vitebsk, where he began his studies under Jehuda Pen, he drew portraits and compositions of his family, friends, animals and ceremonies in a clumsy, but bold style. In St. Petersburg, he developed his iconography,113 transforming the scenes around him and giving them symbolic meaning. And, in Paris, through the influence of the Fauves and the Cubists, he developed his sense of color and arrangement of the picture plane. Inspired by the artists that had lived and worked in Paris before him, Chagall found a pathway that he needed to give visual expression to the ideas, memories and symbols that filled his mind. Most of the symbols and images in Chagall's paintings have complex connotations that operate on more than one level. The menorah (seven-lamped candelabra), seen so often in his paintings, is both a ritual object and a symbol of Judaism's defiance against the forces of destruction. The Torah (a scroll of the Five Books of Moses) is often carried by bearded figures, and can be read as a symbol of suffering, exile, and the destruction of Vitebsk. Throughout history

112This observation is based on the author's survey of over one hundred of Chagall's paintings. 113 Iconography deals with the symbolic, often religious, meaning of objects, persons, or events depicted in works of art. 25

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 26 Jews, have carried the Torah with them when forced to flee. Sometimes the ritual object becomes a deeply personal symbol; thus the chupah (the wedding canopy) is not only a sign of a Jewish wedding, but also a reminder of Chagall’s and Bella's wedding.114 The Crucifix is a symbol of Jewish martyrdom. Clocks are symbols of history, or souvenirs of lost childhood that hang, float or fly in a large number of his paintings. Ladders are also images that recur frequently. They were used in Vitebsk as farm equipment, precautions against fire in the wooden houses, and as a means for roof-climbing grandfathers. They become symbols of man's cruelty to man in the Crucifixion paintings, and can also be interpreted as general symbols of aspiration. As for fish, animals and birds, all of them were prevalent in Vitebsk. The fish were in his father's warehouse, the horses were in the street, the cows were in his grandfather's slaughterhouse and the roosters were in the courtyards. All of these symbols are the tools that Chagall used to transfer his personal experiences to a level of universal significance.115 Another symbol that recurs over and over in Chagall's art is the image of a fiddler on the roof. The fiddler was a central figure in the festivities of the Jewish community in Vitebsk, and his tune accompanied the basic events of life: birth, marriage and the funeral.116 By his appearance at these important moments in life, he became a legendary figure in the life pattern of the community. He appears as such in Chagall's pictures of births, weddings, and funerals. As early in his career as 1908, Chagall had expressed this idea which stemmed from two memories merged into one: his grandfather on the roof, and his grandfather playing the fiddle.117 During the celebration of the festival of Simchath Torah, the holiday which marks the completion of the year's weekly readings in

114Raymond Cognait, Chagall. (New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1978), 89. 116Meyer, 135. 116Wemer Haftmann, Marc Chagall. (New York: Abrams, 1984), 88. 117This symbol, the Fiddler on the roof, was also adopted by the Jewish writer, Sholom Alechem, who wrote warm and humorous tales about life in the shtetl.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 27 the synagogue of the Five Books of Moses, Chagall's maternal grandfather had climbed onto the roof, sat down on a chimney-pot and gorged himself on carrots, thereby becoming a recurring motif in Chagall's paintings.118 In his paintingThe Dead Man (1908), Chagall depicted his grandfather on the roof playing the fiddle. The composition ofThe Dead Man is centered around a street flanked by timber houses. Over one of these houses a flag flies; another has a cobbler's sign in the shape of a shoe hanging from the roof. In the foreground, on the street, lies a dead man wrapped in a Jewish ceremonial shroud surrounded by six burning candles. On the roof of the house to the left sits a man (an image of Chagall's grandfather) playing the violin. A woman raises her hands in grief and turns to the right, where another man is disappearing head first among the houses. In the background, a man is sweeping the street without paying the slightest bit of attention to what is going on around him. This picture is painted in the earth tones of the ghetto: greens, maroons, browns and yellows. Chagall has explained how this picture came about. He was at the home of a friend to whom he was giving painting lessons. Upon glancing out of the window he was struck by the view of the empty, strangely deserted street. In Chagall's eyes, painting the scene exactly as he saw it was not adequate to represent the air of desolation and impending tragedy. Therefore he imagined figures of a different appearance and arrangement to express the mood of the s tre e t.119 The principal actors, the dead man and the wailing woman, are once again linked with recollections of his childhood. As Chagall related in his autobiography, My Life :

Suddenly one morning, well before dawn, shouts rose from the street below our windows. By the faint light from the night lamp, I managed to make out a woman, alone,

118Alexander, 35. 119Meyer, 64.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 28 running through the deserted streets. She is waving her arms, sobbing, imploring the inhabitants, still asleep, to come over and save her husband....The dead man, solemnly sad, is already laid out on the floor, his face illuminated by six candles.120

Chagall brought the figure of his grandfather to life again in The Fiddler (1912). In this piece, the fiddler has a strong legendary undertone. The lonely Jew with his fiddle looms up as an enormous figure before the landscape of Vitebsk. Three brightly clad people, grouped together, gaze up in wonder at the fiddler, who, with a green face, stares fixedly at the viewer. Behind this foreground, not a soul is to be seen, but human footprints from right to left mark out a path of destiny in the empty field. Houses with lamplights shining in their windows, mark off the field against the pitch-black sky. Above all this, as if lured by the fiddler's tune, floats a golden child with a halo. By its gesture, it seems to be blessing the trail of destiny indicated by the steps across the field. This painting is a delicate play of suggestions and metaphors which, within the context of the piece, indicate the rapture of the fiddler and endows this "typical figure" with a legendary existence. Another larger than life figure occurs in the paintingThe Jew in Green (1914). Chagall had returned to Vitebsk in 1914. He wrote in his autobiography that "Vitebsk is a place apart; a town unlike any other, an unhappy town, a boring town" where there were "humped-backed and leanbodied citizens, green Jews..."121 He had always been preoccupied with the typical personalities of Vitebsk. He portrayed everybody and everything: mother, father, himself, his sisters, uncles, aunts. Upon his return to Vitebsk from Paris he set out with his old teacher and friend Jehuda Pen and sketched scenes in and around the town. He was creating a "documentary" to record the people of Vitebsk and their customs. Werner Haftmann, the

120Chagail, Mv Life. 61. 121Haftmann, 92.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 29 author of a biography on Chagall entitled Marc Chagall, wrote that, while Chagall was studying these people, (the beggars, peddlers, and preachers) he came across a "green Jew," a the preacher from Slousk, "not a rabbi but one of those wandering Jews filled with holy inspiration, proclaiming the word of God, their lives full of extraordinary poetic radiance."122 Chagall recalled that "the old man was green; perhaps a shadow from my heart fell upon him."123 So he painted him as such: an old man slumped resignedly in his chair, with his green, inspired face illuminated by his golden beard. The green Jew sits on a stone wall, on which is carved the text of the . Torah, the basis of his existence. He looks as though he could be a prophet, but his Russian cap shows he belongs to the present age. The old man's jacket, shabby and crumpled, confines him. His hands rest upon his knees, but one is golden and the other white. The golden hand makes a connection with his face, sunken in meditation, while the other one, marble white, seems to scan and interpret the words chiseled on the wall beneath him. By this unrealistic coloring alone, his hands evoke the aura of deep meditation and the interpretation of the holy work which fills the whole being of the devout Jew. It is quite clear that in Chagall's portrayal ofJew the in Green, he is transforming a fleeting moment of observation into something enduring with universal significance. In a discussion with Jacques Lassaigne, which Lassaigne recalled in his book published in 1957, Chagall himself, with reference to Jew in Green, described the circumstances of the painting very precisely:

I start from the initial shock of something actual and spiritual, from some definite thing, and then go on toward something more abstract....This is what happened in theJew in Green, whom I painted surrounded by Hebrew words and script characters (this is

122Ibid. 123Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 30 no symbolism, it is exactly how I saw it, this is the actual atmosphere in which I found him).... I believe that in this way I arrive at the symbol, without being symbolistic or literary.124

Another clear example of how Chagall turned the picture plane into a mirror of his memory is in the paintingI and the Village (1912). This painting, like memories, is made up of many superimposed images that together create a composite field of experience. At the right appears the huge face of the painter in profile.125 In amazement he stares at a white cow's head, a symbol of the village's all nourishing force, and she stares fixedly back at the painter.126 Their intimate relationship is indicated by a fine line which connects their eyes. This is further emphasized by the shy gesture with which the painter offers the cow a bouquet of flowers. In this atmosphere the cow loses her animal status and becomes a familiar personality, symbolic of rural security and the nurturing mother.127 Additional symbolic objects set the scene: at the top is an abbreviated version of Vitebsk with its domed church; a peasant with his scythe crosses an open field; a woman points out the way for him, and the fact that she, together with some of the little houses, is upside down is not disturbing in this dream-like atmosphere. There is a transparent region in the cow's head where a milkmaid sits and milks the same white cow. All of these elements fit together to create a visual representation of the feelings the painter has when he looks out over his village. From as early as 1912 up until his death, Chagall juxtaposed images of Paris and Vitebsk in the same painting, as though he was paying homage to his two sources of inspiration.Red In Roofs (1954), there is a glimpse of the Seine and the facade of Notre-Dame in the upper left-hand corner. This city view sinks into darkness.

124Ibid. 125Ibid., 70. 126Ibid. 127Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 3 1 The main view, within the bright red zone, is the town of Vitebsk, enlivened by small figures and happenings, and, in front of a little domed church, is a small, yellow crucified figure. The painter himself appears in the right hand comer of the painting bowing in veneration before the town of his childhood. Above his head the figure of a Jewish man holding the Torah scroll emerges from the sun. The four regions of the picture represent the three groups of themes of Chagall’s art - the outer world of Paris, the Vitebsk of memory, and the eternal roots of his Judaism. With Paris at his back, the painter pays homage his place of origin and the source of his religious feelings. Another important painting of this period which juxtaposes Vitebsk and Paris Self is Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912). This painting also provides some insight to Chagall's position as man and artist at that time. He was so successful and had so much work he needed seven fingers on his hands to accomplish it all.128 The self portrait shows little resemblance to his own face. It seems that Chagall rendered only those features that have a direct connection with artistic vision and creation: the almond shaped eyes, the wide forehead, and the mouth tensed by conviction and will. Completely vanished are self doubt and vulnerability.129 The whole picture is saturated with bright, friendly colors. At the upper left, above a small table, a window opens onto a view of Paris at night; at the upper right, a fragment of Vitebsk floats among the clouds. The words "Paris" and "Russia" are written like captions to these views in Hebrew characters. The two poles of Chagall's art, Paris and Vitebsk are brought together in this painting. One of the most important paintings of his Paris period is Hommage a Apollinaire (1911-12). The title was inspired by the enthusiasm he felt about meeting the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire had visited Chagall's studio in 1913.130 Apollinaire particularly admired this work and, in order to thank him the

1280ri Z. Soltes, Personal interview by author, 5 May 1992, Washington, D.C. 129Meyer, 168. 130Ibid., 154.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 32 painter inscribed a dedication on the picture not only to Apollinaire, but also to Blaise Cendrars and Riciotto Canudo, whom he had met through Apollinaire.131 Their four names are arranged in a square at the lower left-hand comer of the picture around a heart pierced by an arrow. The central motif of Hommage a Apollinaire is a man and a woman fused up to the hips into a single body, and then separated from there up. The Old Testament story of the creation of Adam and Eve offers a clue to the painting's interpretation. God drew Eve from the flank of Adam thus creating two sexes. Chagall's creature stands under the tree of knowledge with apples in its hands; nearby the serpent rears its head. Thus, Chagall linked the biblical motif of the division of the sexes with the Fall of Man. It seems that during his first two years in Paris, 1910 and 1911, despite the distance from his native land, Chagall's paintings concentrated heavily on his beloved Vitebsk. But while these memories of Russia continued to dominate the themes of his pictures, the motifs that came to the forefront in 1912 had a more obvious Jewish character than previously. They resulted in paintings of Jewish ceremonies and a number of large figure paintings of Jewish types. What seemed to move him the most was the reverence and meekness of the old Hasidim. The first evidence of this is found The in Pinch of Snuff (1912). A Jew, perhaps a rabbi, seated at a table in a synagogue, takes a pinch of snuff from a little box. His old-fashioned peyes hang from under his skullcap.132 Chagall's only concession to fantasy in this piece was to sign his name upside down. The Jew atPrayer (1912/13) is based on a similar theme. The inner excitement of a man at prayer bends his body in an arc and tenses his arms. His features are reduced to simple lines and curves. The figure stands out against the rich darkness of greenish

131 lb id. 132Peyes are the ritual corkscrew curls that Hasidic men wear in accordance with the law requiring that they keep their faces covered in front of the eyes of the lord.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 33 and mauve tinted white. Above his head is a Star of David, and behind him a blue Torah scroll gleams. An additional and important theme that recurred over and over in Chagall's work was the ritual slaughtering and preparing of kosher animals. During the summers, Chagall's mother sent him to live with his grandfather in a nearby village.133 His grandfather, a kosher butcher by trade, performed the ritual of the slaughter of animals in its religious, sacrificial form. As Chagall recounted, his grandfather spent half his life on the roof, a quarter of it in the synagogue, and the rest slaughtering and preparing the animals.134 Chagall had seen the animals killed on several occasions. He had suffered with the animals when their throats were cut, but he also understood the meaning of the sacrifice. In My Life, he wrote:"...and you, little cow, naked and crucified, in heaven you are dreaming. The glittering knife has borne you aloft...."135 Chagall's studio in La Ruche was close to the slaughter houses of Paris, so the memories of seeing animals slaughtered when he was a child were reinforced while he was an adult. In an interview with Werner Haftmann he recalled that "Dawn is breaking. Somewhere not far away they start cutting the throats of the cattle, cows bellow, and I paint them."136 This image of the sacrificed animal was a motif that he would return to throughout his career and it would become a symbol of suffering. In the painting,Flayed Ox (1947), this suffering still lingers. A gigantic crucified body of an ox hangs before a nocturnal scene depicting the town of Vitebsk. Chagall's first version of this piece was painted in the 1920's. At that time the slaughtered ox, viewed from its underside, with its carcass cut open, hung from the butcher's hook over a tub to catch the blood.137 InFlayed the Ox, the animal's carcass is cut open, but it somehow lives, greedily lapping its own

133Haftmann, 10. 134Ibid. 135Horst Keller, Marc Chagall: Life and Works (Woodbury, N.Y.: Barron's Educational Series Inc., 1980), 81. 136Haftmann, 130. 137Meyer, 480.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 34 blood from the bucket below it. On the left, a chicken runs away. This takes place in front of Vitebsk on a clear, bright winter's night; against the background of little houses piled up like boxes. The ox hangs as a sacramental offering, a vision of terror which contrasts to the peacefulness of the scene. The head of a peasant woman gazes compassionately at it across the roof of a house. At the top right, a bearded Jew flies into the picture with outstretched arms as though a messenger of terror. His bloody knife indicates he is the slaughterer who has performed the sacrificial ritual. Above him, a burning candle, Chagall’s emblem for peace, warmth, and tranquility threatens to go out.138 Through analyzing these objects it can be seen that the painting is concerned with an interpretation of the Crucifixion theme. The image of the ox is a representative, universal sign for the crucified Christ.139 During the years of World War II, Chagall painted many pictures with scenes of devastation - villages on fire, people fleeing, some depicting a crucified figure amidst the misery of Vitebsk. None, however, has the solemnity and timeless symbolism which we in theFlayed Ox where the agony of the times has been gathered into one definitive metaphoric picture. Chagall's first Crucifixion scene which depicted Christ was in the paintingGolgotha (1912), his first great religious composition. His choice to paint the Crucifixion is not surprising. For Chagall, Christ was a Jew, as he stressed through the symbolism in his Crucifixes.140 According to Franz Meyer, Chagall had always held the figure of Christ in great veneration, regarding Him as a perfect man, who out of love took upon Himself to die for the world’s salvation.141 Christ appears over and over again throughout Chagall’s woTk, particularly those that were painted during the most bitter times when Jews were persecuted. In a conversation with Franz Meyer, Chagall recalled a situation which occured during the creationGolgotha of , which

138Ibid. 139Ibid. 140Ibid., 435. 141Ibid., 416.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 35 centers around a blue child hanging from a cross: "Strictly speaking, there was only a blue child in the air. The Cross was of less interest to me." What interested him was the vision.142 The painting contains the central figure, the baby Christ on the cross, in front of unreal scenery. Green circles and arcs make an active, cosmic field. Red, earthy tones mark out the base of the composition, which is reflected in rose-colored islands behind the cross. Green is the color of the heavenly zone. A great green circle surrounds the Christ figure. Two attendant figures at the foot of the Cross are connected by a light that streams off the transverse beam. A small female figure standing to the right of the cross is dressed in a daintily embellished robe, her left breast exposed as in the portrayals of the nursing Madonna in Byzantine icons. At the left of the cross stands a gigantic, prophetic figure of a lamenting man clad in a multicolored Oriental garment. The color blue, assigned to the Christ child, is reflected in the flame-like sail of a boat which is gliding over the water to the islands beyond. The boatman looks angrily across at an ugly gnome in Oriental garb as he drags away a ladder which, according to Werner Haftmann, is one of the instruments of Christ's torture in Chagall's iconography.143 In the Spring of 1931, Chagall visited Israel (with the bible illustrations commissioned by Vollard in mind). Filled with memories of the land of his forefathers, he began to illustrate the Bible and continued it throughout the following years. Then the news of the Jewish persecutions came from Germany.144 These persecutions clearly influenced his painting. In 1933 he painted the pictureSolitude which belonged to this series of Bible etchings. InSolitude, we see a Jew in a prayer robe to the left side of the picture plane meditating with a Torah in his arms and his head propped on his hand. On the right, a white cow squats, and in front of her a violin seemingly plays itself, but its

142Haftmann, 84. 143Ibid. 144Haftmann, 118.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 36 placement next to the cow makes it seem as though she were really the musician. Behind the two principal figures the steeples of the churches looming over the houses of Vitebsk can be seen. In the sky, an angel floats in a circle of light. The flying angel and the fiddling cow possibly symbolize the heavenly messenger and spiritual force.145 Franz Meyer has stated that for the Jewish worshipper in this painting, everything is pushed into the distance in time and space. Thus, Solitude depicts the fate of a Jew in exile, severed from his own physical world.146 The White Crucifixion, painted in 1937, is also a direct response to the events of the times. The persecution of the Jews in Germany had begun and the first pograms had taken place. Anti- Semitism had also made itself felt in certain areas of France, where Chagall was living at the time. In the center of this painting, beneath a white flow of light, is a huge portrayal of the crucified, not as the bringer of salvation, but as a symbol of the martyred Jewish people. Here the figure of Christ is no longer a child, as in the painting Golgotha. This Christ is really crucified, stretched in immense pain above a world of horror. Although Christ is the central figure, this is not a Christian picture. The Hebrew inscription, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews," together with his loincloth cut from a tallith (Jewish prayer shawl), points to the Jewish origin of the crucified. At the foot of the cross burns a Jewish menorah surrounded by a halo like that which frames Christ's head. Floating above the cross are lamenting figures from the Old Testament. The scenes of disaster around the central figure constitute a display of what Chagall envisioned as the martyrdom of the Jews.147 To the left, a group of soldiers climb up and over a hill to storm a burning village. A boat loaded with soldiers and a screaming woman drifts across a river. On the right hand side, a storm trooper has reached a synagogue and set it on fire; he is about to drag the Torah

145Meyer, 395. 146Ibid. 147Ibid., 435.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 37 rolls from their shrine. In the foreground, a Torah burns, while a Jew in his caftan hurries toward it with a gesture of lamentation. To the left a shouting man, clutching a Torah roll to his chest with both arms, hurries away with a backward glance at the synagogue. In front of him a helpless old man walks into a void. (At one time on the cloth on his breast was written the words "I am a Jew," which Chagall later removed.148) Werner Haftmann claims that this Christ's relation to the world differs from that in all Christian representations of the Crucifixion.149 In Christian representations it is not the world that suffers, but rather all suffering is concentrated in Christ. Here, it seems as though it is not only Christ that suffers, but that suffering remains man's fate and is not abolished by Christ's death. Chagall's Christ lacks the Christian concept of salvation. The White Crucifixion gives the viewer a sense of history at the time it was created. The details of the painting have a tragic sharpness that is moving, and, in the unity of the picture, they become part of the timeless tragedy. In this work, Chagall has given the suffering and distress of this day a primordial reality. Finally, inThe Martyr (1940), instead of a typical Christ on the cross, a Jew is bound to the stake, wearing a Russian cap and a loincloth decorated with the two black stripes of the tallith. Behind him the houses flanking a village street are set on fire. To the lower left of the cross a man with a portion of his head missing is seen. He plays the violin, while a woman leans against the cross weeping. At the right are Chagall's parents, and, barely visible at the corner of the painting, we see Chagall himself.150 Everything in this painting is closer-up, more moving and more pathetic than in theWhite Crucifixion. Color is dominated by the pale yellow of the martyr’s body beside the dingy brown of the

148Haftmann, 118. 149Meyer, 414. 150Ibid., 435.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 38 houses. Here, a far more personal, that of Chagall and his immediate family, cry rings out amidst the tragedy of the death of Christ. Chagall also painted self-portraits in which he depicted himself in the act of painting a Crucifixion. The In Painter and Christ (date unknown) we see Chagall overcome by grief sitting in front of one of his paintings of Christ. In this painting within a painting, Christ is a giant, dwarfing a bent aged Jewish man who trudges slowly by. Here Christ is not a symbol of pain mirroring man's destiny. Instead he is a symbol of the intense pain of every individual, represented by the pain felt by the artist himself during the act of artistic creation.151 In one painting,The Painter Crucified (date unknown) the artist is crucified, one arm stretched out on the Cross, the other holding his palette. Although painting always brought Chagall joy and satisfaction, it also involved dedication and self-sacrifice. The concept of suffering with which Chagall identified himself led him to a common ground. As a Jew he suffered with the Jews, as well as with the "King of the Jews" who to Christians is the son of God incarnate.152 One of the most important paintings of Chagall's career, which encompasses virtually all of his symbolism portraying the oppression and suffering of his people,The is Falling Angel (1923- 1947). It took twenty-four years for him to create this painting. The individual phases of its creation marked decisive events in Chagall's life.153

151 Ibid. 152Writers on Chagall, among them Franz Meyer and Jean Cassou agree on the difficulty of interpreting Chagall's Crucifixions. The first impression of them is that they are paintings of Jewish people. But they are an expression of religious sentiment that goes beyond the differences in Judaism and Christianity, beyond the personalities and the doctrines of the two religions, and express rather what unites the two. Chagall did not take into account the differences and distinctions between religions, but reduced all to the common denominator of human suffering.

153Meyer, 490.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 39 The painting depicts an angel falling from a gloomy sky, its wings outstretched and one jagged wing tip hitting the town of Vitebsk. Its helplessly extended arm and one terrified eye, which stares out fixedly at the viewer, seem to signify that the angel is suffering the same fate that, in its fall, it will inflict upon the world.154 In the face of this destruction, a terrified Rabbi snatches up a Torah scroll and carries it away. There is hope, however. In the midst of this tumult, between the terrified faces of the rabbi and the falling angel, floats a golden star, and from below, in the same golden tone, rises the head of a cow, gazing astonished and uncomprehending at the scene, while a violin plays a perpetual tune by itself. The golden star is related to the golden clock pendulum and the flame of the burning candle on the right. As small and bright fixed points, these signs of light impose a calm aura over the surface. In the circle of light from the candle, two small figures appear: to the right is a Crucifix wearing a tallith for a loincloth; to the left, emerging from the wing of the falling angel, a mother and her child. The smallness of these figures and their independence from the rest of the composition detach the little scene from the drama of events, making it a picture within a picture. As it can be seen, it is not possible to understand Chagall's paintings without placing them in the Judaic context from which they derived their inspiration. Each symbol relates to Chagall's experiences in Vitebsk where Jewish life formed the core of his existence. Springing from personal memories of his life and heritage, Chagall's images obtain universal meaning as they tell us of not only the joys and sufferings of the Jews, but of all people.

154Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 4 CHAIM SOUTINE: BACKGROUND AND ARTISTIC DEVELOPMENT

Chaim Soutine was bom in 1893 in Smilovitchi, a Lithuanian village of about 400 inhabitants near Minsk the tenth of eleven children of a poor Jewish mender.155 Little is known of Soutine's childhood because, unlike Chagall, he left no autobiography, diaries, memoirs, or other written evidence. The six hundred to one thousand oil paintings that he left behind are virtually all that reveal his life, for no members of his family can be found by researchers.156 He did, however, speak with bitterness to a few friends late in life of his childhood. From their accounts, particularly from the painter Micnei Kikoine, a friend from Smilovitchi, one can sketch the chronology and essence of his childhood.157 Smilovitchi was a depressing town, a gray mass of dilapidated wooden houses where the sky was virtually always a somber gray-green.158 One of Soutine's earliest recollections was the image of his father "squatting in a Buddah-like position, working at his mending at all hours of the day."159 His mother was "old before her time...always worried and uncommunicative...not particularly affectionate with her numerous progeny."160 At the age of seven, Soutine loved to draw, and would sketch on any scrap of paper he could find, or even on the walls with charcoal.161 His Orthodox father, who wanted Soutine to become a

155Tuchman, 7. 156Alfred Wemer, Soutine (New York: Henry N. Abrams, Inc., 1985), 11. 157Tuchman, 7. 158Ibid. 159Ibid. 160Ibid. 161Tuchman, 7. 4 0

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 41 tailor, considered the pursuit of art blasphemous and crazy, and punished him severely for drawing. His two brothers also beat him mercilessly saying "a Jew must not paint".162 Their cruelty became a ritual. Soutine would flee his brothers and hide in the woods near the village until hunger forced him home. He would return to find milk and black bread waiting for him on the table. But when he entered the kitchen, he would be beaten again by his waiting brothers.163 At one point, he stole some utensils from his mother's kitchen in order to buy a colored pencil. For this he was condemned to two days incarceration in the family cellar.164 He also recalled that his parents punished him for drawing by locking him in the chicken coop.165 Soutine was expelled from school because of his poor academic record. It is not known how he occupied his time thereafter, except that he would frequently leave home in rebellion against his family.166 One day, when Soutine was about sixteen, he asked a pious Jew to pose for a portrait. The next day this man's son and his friends attacked Soutine because they considered portraiture sinful. They beat him so severely that he almost died. He was eventually rescued, but it was a week before he could walk again.167 His mother lodged a complaint against the aggressors, and Soutine was granted an award of twenty-five rubels. With this money, Soutine set off with his friend Kikoine to become an artist.168 Kikoine related that "our first instructor in Minsk was a man named Krueger who gave private lessons and guaranteed success in three months."169 This of course, was a fraudulent claim. It is unknown how Soutine and Kikoine managed to survive in Minsk, but

162Ibid. 163Ibid. 164 Werner, 16. 165 Ibid., 15. 166Ibid., 16. 167Monroe Wheeler, Soutine (New York: Amo Press, 1966) 31. 168Tuchman, 9. 169Cognait, 29.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 42 Minsk had a large Jewish community, and it is likely that they applied to Jewish organizations or asked compassionate Jews for financial assistance. Soutine, like Chagall, also might have worked as a photographer's assistant, retouching or enlarging pictures.170 A year later, Soutine moved to Vilna. While Vilna was not larger than Minsk, it had the advantage of possessing a school of fine arts. He applied to the Ecole des Beaux Arts for a three year course. In an unpublished biography of Soutine, Henry Serouys said that Soutine:

was asked to draw a cone, a cube and a pitcher. Being terribly nervous, he made a mistake in perspective which caused him to be refused admission. He wept at the feet of Professor Rebakoff. Moved by his tears, the old director took pity on Soutine and gave him another opportunity to pass the examination, this time alone in the classroom. He accomplished the exercise perfectly and became a brilliant student at the school.171

The instruction in Vilna probably encompassed the traditional dry, academic style of accurate drawing and painting that was the genre in Russia at the time. In his own sketches Soutine chose subjects evocative of sadness, misery and suffering.172 His hardship and pessimism had set a tragic tone for his painting that would continue throughout his life, irrespective of the subject matter he chose. Soutine once even staged a Jewish burial.173 He had Kikoine lie down and cover himself with a white drape, then he encircled the shrouded figure with candles and drew the scene.174 (An interesting coincidence is that Chagall painted The Dead Man depicting a very similar scene in

170 Werner, 17. 171Tuchman, 9. 172Ibid. 173The date of this event is unknown. 174Cognait, 29.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 43 1908.) At this early stage in his artistic development, Soutine hid all of the paintings and drawings he created, and destroyed anything which did not please him. He continued this practice throughout his career. By 1912 Soutine realized that he was stifled under the influence of the Academy. He finished the three year course in Vilna and saved enough money to buy a train ticket to France. Accompanied by his friend Kikoine, he arrived in Paris in July of 1912. He was nineteen years old.175 1912 was an exciting year in Paris. The avant-garde galleries exhibited works by the Fauves, Cubists, and Futurists.176 These paintings must have startled Soutine, who had only seen reproductions of works by old masters in Vilna and had never seen anything in Lithuania even vaguely resembling anti-traditional art. He chose again to enroll in an Academic art school under Fernand Cormon. Cormon, however, was not a stimulating teacher, and Soutine left him before long.177 In Paris, Soutine had found housing at La Ruche, where Chagall also lived and worked at the same time. They never became friends. He did become close friends, however, with Amedeo Modigliani, another Jewish painter who was familiar with Chagall. Modigliani introduced Soutine to his patron and dealer Zborowski. Soutine also befriended several slaughter-house employees, who saved meat for him that he used as a still-life subject to practice drawing.178 Soutine was unable to make a profit from selling his paintings, because they were unattractive in subject matter, and unappealing to buyers. He was poor during these first years in Paris, so poor that he almost lost his will to live. At one point he

17^Werner, 19. 176Futurism originated in 1909. It is a derivative of Cubism, in which the painted and sculpted objects are imbued with a sense of motion. 177Werner, 19. 178Ibid., 68.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 44 even tried to hang himself.179 He tried to support himself by working as a porter at a railroad station and, during World War I, as a ditch digger.180 There are numerous stories of his extreme poverty and of his notorious uncleanliness. The most poignant anecdotes - such as stories of how he tried to keep bugs away from his bed with pans of kerosene, or how he made underwear serve as a shirt - indicate both his stubborn perseverance and his ingenuity in the face of hardship.181 In order to seek relief from this misery, however, Soutine turned to alcohol.182 Sometime in 1918, Soutine left Paris, probably for the first time since he had arrived in France, to visit Cagnes.183 The following year he visited Ceret in the Pyrenees, where he later settled in 1919 for about three years.184 Zborowski supported him while he was there.185 Perhaps Zborowski intuitively grasped the potential of sending Soutine away from Paris, because Soutine became stimulated by his new visual environment and took great strides forward in his art. During this time, he painted over two hundred canvases.186 But, as his art developed, he continued to destroy many of his canvases.187 When Soutine returned to Paris in 1925, his painting became all consuming, an obsession. He became concerned with getting the painted image just right, no matter how many trials it took. Some subjects were painted twenty times. Models and subjects became more difficult to find and they took on greater significance to him. He would search poultry shops for a particular chicken to paint, one with a "long neck and blue skin."188 On one

179Ibid., 20. 18°Ibid. 181Tuchman, 17. 182Ibid. 183Ibid., 21. 184Ibid. 185Ibid. 186Ibid„ 23. 187Wheeler, 33. 188Tuchman, 37.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 45 occasion, a butcher offered him a fat chicken out of sympathy for his apparent poverty, but Soutine insisted on buying an emaciated fowl. On the street he held up the bird admiringly and said, "I'm going to hang it up by the beak with a nail. In a few days it should be perfect."189 He spent two years painting a series of dead birds: pheasants, geese and other deplumed fowl strung up by their necks.190 He also worked to perfect the painted image of numerous dead animal carcasses, their entrails exposed, analyzed and painted with great care. At one point, in 1925, he procured an entire carcass of a steer. He painted at least four paintings of the steer while it was decomposing. He retrieved a pail of blood from the butcher so that when a portion of the beef dried out, he could freshen its color. He even went so far as to hire a model to sit beside the carcass and fan the flies away. His neighbors complained of the odor of the rotting flesh, but when the police arrived, Soutine harangued them on how much more important art was than sanitation.191 Soutine could not bear to have anyone watch him while he painted, nor did he allow anyone to see his work until it was finished and judged acceptable by him. Once he got started, he worked in a frenzy until he reached a state of exhaustion, oblivious of the needs of his (human) models. One day, in a fury of painting, he dislocated his thumb.192 He lacerated and destroyed many of his paintings with the same frenzy that had attended their creation. Soutine frequented flea markets to buy old, worthless paintings, that he would scour, clean and then paint over. At first this was for purely economic reasons. But he maintained this habit even when he could afford to buy new canvases. He jokingly mentioned that "this vandalism, which makes me eliminate a bad painting, obliges me to make a masterpiece."193

189lbid. 190Wheeler, 72. 191 Ibid., 68. 192Ibid., 39. 193Tuchman, 41.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 46 Dr. Albert C. Barnes, the founder of the Barnes Collection, a private collection in Philadelphia, bought scores of Soutine's paintings in 1923 (estimates vary from 50 to 100).194 Subsequent purchases of Soutine's work by other collectors the following year created a demand for his paintings which continued throughout his life. After 1923, Soutine never had to worry about finances. But he developed odd fetishes, such as buying dozens of hats of exactly the same shape and gray color.195 He apparently had come to believe that clothing had almost supernatural powers. He also had a mortal fear of losing his hair and went so far as to engage the services of a nun who visited him regularly to massage and treat it with a special tonic.196 Soutine also had phobias which were much sadder and more serious. He was afraid to deposit money in a bank because when he went there he would be overcome by a terrifying feeling that the uniformed guard was going to creep up behind him and strangle him as soon as he stood before the teller's window.197 A still more disturbing phobia concerned the illness which Soutine suffered when he found, in an old discarded can, a piece of meat he had thrown away. Soutine, v/ho had suffered from ulcers all his life, imagined that the other part of the meat, which he had cooked and eaten days before, was now rotting in his stomach. He believed that the meat had poisoned him and that he would soon die.198 In the 1930's, Soutine turned away from painting dead animals and painted live sheep, donkeys, pigs, landscapes and still- lifes. Some of his paintings focused on small children, a boy and a girl holding hands, perhaps on their return from school. But whereas one would imagine these paintings would have a sweet, anecdotal nature, the characteristic tone in these paintings is sadness. From 1931 to 1935, Soutine spent his summers near Chartres at the country chateau of one of his patrons. His production

194Werner, 19. 195Tuchman, 46. 196Ibid. 197Ibid. 198Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. declined sharply during this time. He continued to search for the right landscape and the right model, but the periods of waiting for inspiration became longer.199 Under the German Occupation, Soutine, as a registered Jew, was forced to take refuge outside Paris in Champigny-sur-Veuldre and other small provincial towns. Several times he was forced to flee from one sanctuary to another when discovery by the Nazis threatened him. His stomach ulcer became more painful and violent attacks of indigestion became frequent. In August, 1943 he suffered a severe rupture of the ulcer. Because of the dangers of the Occupation, much time was lost in relocating him to a Paris clinic. Soutine died during an operation on August 9, at the age of 50. He was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.200 Soutine's critical attitude toward his work and his eagerness to surpass himself contributed to his death. But this drive for perfection also resulted in the creation of masterpieces that currently hang in museums all over the world.

1 "ib id ., 48. 200Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 5 ANALYSIS OF JUDAIC IMAGERY IN SELECTED PAINTINGS BY CHAIM SOUTINE

Soutine was twenty years old before he left the culture of the shtetl, and the affects of his childhood would shape the essence of his painting throughout his entire career. His rigid, religious and abusive upbringing manifested itself in chronic feelings of self doubt and alienation. His extreme poverty in Paris intensified these feelings. Soon his art was all he had, his only escape. It became a consuming passion. He became extremely compulsive about getting an image exactly right, and often finished a painting in one sitting, no matter how long it took.201 Although many biographies have been written about Soutine, there is little reference to the recurring influences shtetl life in his painting. In the shtetl, high value was placed on emotional expressiveness and feeling. Former inhabitants of shtetl culture describe daily life as being full of energy, noise and agitation. Expressions of vitality in almost any form were regarded as healthy and desirable. Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, the authors of Life is With People, a book published about Judaic culture in 1962, described the concept of "sholem bayis", or household peace, as "a state of dynamic equilibrium" rather than "unruffled serenity." In their words:

A happy household is a swirl of people, all busy, all talking. There may be arguments and nagging, mutual recriminations. All this is part of being expressive, part of showing one's affection and interest, part of the

201Tuchman 39. 4 8

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 49 experience in sharing in the experiences of one's family.202

Soutine's vigorous animation of the canvas surface may be a reflection of the intense emotionalism of the shtetl.203 A mixture of joy, sadness, and enthusiasm is exuded by all of his paintings. The flow of passion often overwhelms the forms, calling to mind an analogy to Yiddish literature, in which all form and structure is submerged in an outpouring of sentiment, a passion both intellectual and ecstatic.204 Soutine's emotional intensity can be seen, for example, in his paintings of trees shaken and bent by storms. The trees in canvases of more classical artists, such as Claude Lorrain and Poussin, are straight and still, each standing apart and painted individually. But Soutine's trees are painted in a much less serene and less peaceful manner. Windy day, Auxerre (1939) depicts trees threatened by the forces of nature that pierce a moody, dark sky. Their branches are tossed by wind. Behind the tree trunks, there is the suggestion of a small cottage. Two tiny figures are seen coming down a winding road. Their smallness accentuates the tremendous height and agitation of the trees. In the shtetl, the Jew's high regard for feeling was characteristically expressed in words. Visual expression was considered sinful. The Second Commandment and the Bible (Chapter 15:5) clearly forbade it. The Christian image of a Divinity was regarded as inferior because it was something corporeal, represented visually on an icon. The shtetl child had no vivid image of God; God was "conceived of as a disembodied and all-pervasive presence"205, a concept consistent with the prohibition against graven images.

202Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, Life is with People. (New York: Schocken, 1962) 301. 203Tuchman, 10. 204Abraham J. Heschel, The Eastern European Era in Jewish History (New York: Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, 1946), 1. 205Zborowski, 339.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 50 Distrust and even fear of the visual was manifest on other levels and in different areas of shtetl life as well. The process of looking, for example, was said to be dangerous. A pregnant woman was taught to avoid anything that might harm the unborn child.

A pregnant woman must be on the alert every minute of every day...if a mother mislooks herself on an animal she may give birth to a monster and it will be said that she bore a calf or a dog. An ugly or misshapen person is commonly referred to as a mislooked one.206

After a baby was born, it was thought that it might be harmed by being looked at too much. The child was protected from the gaze of outsiders. The mother would distract a spectator's attention by diverting his glance to something else. Any common ailment at any age was blamed on the "evil eye". Therefore, the act of looking and seeing was associated with a terrible power - hence the phenomenon of the orthodox Jew who would avoid the sight of women and would adopt an habitually evasive glance.207 Because the visual experience was so impugned in his youth, Soutine reacted by insisting on the importance of the concretely perceived object. Violating the Judaic laws pertaining to sight became the basis of his art.208 The shtetl's injunction against "seeing" produced in Soutine a most compelling need to experience visual sensation, even when he was uncomfortable with it. This is probably the reason Soutine did one portrait of a nude woman,Female Nude, painted around 1933.209 The model looks so bashful and timid that it is obvious her own image reflects the painter’s feelings of shame and embarrassment. Soutine's shyness was undoubtedly influenced by the shtetl’s injunction

200Zborowski, 312-313. 207Tuchman, 11. 208Ibid. 209Wheeler, 83.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 5 1 against witnessing nakedness. In a biography by Alfred Werner, there is a quote about this attitude of the Ghetto Jew.

The body is respected primarily as the container and squire of the mind and spirit. Physical superiority is not Jewish, but is rather ascribed to the goy (the non Jew)...ideals of beauty reflect the exalting of the spiritual over the physical. Jewish portraits and paintings characteristically depict a head that is real; if the body appears, it is apt to look like a dummy covered with clothes.210

Soutine avoided the anxieties associated with painting the human body by painting people in uniform. Servants were regarded with disdain in the shtetl because it was believed that their identity was determined by their social roie rather than through their own individual personalities.211 Painting uniforms probably appealed to Soutine because of their even tonality and less varied textures than street clothing.212 The affect of the uniform is to hide individuality, depersonalize, and to cover uniqueness with anonymity. In Soutine's portraits of uniformed figures, the uniform serves as an artificial skin, which was much easier for him to reconcile with painting than actual flesh.213 One of Soutine's earliest paintings know todayPortrait is of a Nurse (1916). From this piece, one can discern the direction in which the artist's style would soon develop. The weary, melancholy expression on the subject's face is one that would appear over and over again in Soutine's paintings. The nurse is very flat, without depth, and from her image, one can sense the beginning of Soutine's practice of distorting figures, that appears later in his career.

21 °Ibid., 110. 211Tuchman, 13. 212Tuchman, 35. 213Ibid.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 52 Soutine chose subjects, such as the nude, which were particularly prohibited by shtetl culture. This happened too often to be coincidental. In spite of his attempt to forget his life in the shtetl, and in spite of his dislike for nostalgic or folkloric subjects, echoes of his childhood appear in his work. The most direct examples of this are in Soutine’s famous images of hanging, splayed fowl. These birds, although dead, are imbued with a sense of violent movement. These paintings refer directly to a shtetl custom which would have been familiar to Soutine. On the Eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of Atonement, there occurred a ritual of absolution called kapparah. A fowl was whirled over a penitient’s head (usually the person who was the head of the household) with an appropriate prayer to absolve him and his family of their sins. Soutine's dead fowls appear to be in motion, as though he was portraying the whirling motion of the bird during this ceremony. From 1925-1927, Soutine painted more than twenty versions of fowl hung by the head or the legs from a hook on the ceiling or the wall.214 Dead Fowl (1924) depicts the wild, whirling movement associated with the kapparah ceremony discussed above, but it also seems as though Soutine wished to portray the animal as a symbolic victim of cruelty and torture. One is reminded of the image of people strung up by the neck in a lynching. In the shtetl, rituals connected with food were very important. Food became:

a link between the holy and profane, the community and the person, husband and wife, mother and children. Precisely because of its scarcity, it was a means of expressing love and releasing anger. The happiest holidays of the year mean special foods; the holiest, a denial of food.215

214Ibid., 86. 215Irving Howe and Elieer Greenberg, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories (New York: Meridian) 1958.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 53 Soutine was fascinated by painting all kinds of foods and tableware, and by the men who handle food: cooks and waiters. This interest may be rooted in the shtetl rituals concerning food, and the tormenting deprivations of food in his youth and in his early years in Paris. Still Life with Soup Tureen (1916) is painted in somber browns, greens and greys. Soutine placed all of the objects: the tureen, the plate with a giant fork on it, the two spoons, the wine bottle and the empty glass on a table and viewed them in an almost Cubistic manner, both from the front and from the top. It is symbolic that the plate is bare, and that the bowl and wine glass are empty. Soutine had been deprived of food in the shtetl because of his poverty. These memories were amplified later in his life during his periods of starvation in Paris. This painting may have been created at a time when he was so driven by hunger that he had to steal bottles which he exchanged for bread.216 Most still-life paintings that involve food present the food in a manner that is appealing and appetizing to the viewer. The food that Soutine painted, however, is usually unappealing.Still life with Fish, Eggs, and Lemons (1923) reveals the bitterness of a poverty stricken artist who hated the food he could not obtain, and later, the revulsion of the ulcer sufferer who was unable to eat the food that he could afford. In this painting, the fish looks mutilated and the eggs and the lemons are very sketchily rendered. Likewise, Still his Life with Ray (1924) depicts a ray, also known as a skate, with a small, mask-like face that is endowed with a menacing, almost demonic quality. There is beauty in these works, however, which lies in Soutine's thick brushwork and his use of pigment. Soutine often violated the dietary concept of "kosher" by hanging up bloody animal carcasses for days, investigating and painting them over and over. Once again, he was compelled to see an object that was forbidden and to paint it.

216Werner, 48.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 54 Soutine himself elucidated his own motivations and desires in a revealing comment that he made to his friend and biographer Emile Szittya:

Once I saw the village butcher slice the neck of a bird and drain the blood out of it. I wanted to cry out, but his joyful expression caught the sound in my throat. This cry I always feel there. When, as a child, I drew a crude portrait of my professor, I tried to rid myself of this cry, but in vain. When I painted the beef carcass it was still this cry that I wanted to liberate. I have still not succeeded.217

Soutine painted great, hulking carcasses of beef. In the late twenties, an art enthusiast scarcely heard of Soutine without some mention of the gruesome circumstances of the production of these paintings.218 In 1922 he paintedSide of Beef in a straight forward, realistic style. The vivid red of steak, the ivory and pale yellow of fat, and the finely executed hollowness inside the curved ribs of the animal are painted meticulously. He did at least four similar paintings, three of which are now in museums in Grenoble, Amsterdam and Buffalo.219 Although this seems to be a very unique theme, Soutine was not the first artist to occupy himself with this grisly subject. Rembrandt's Slaughtered Ox (1655) depicts a disemboweled carcass hanging on a wooden frame in a butcher's cellar.220 Soutine'sCarcass of Beef (1925) is a very startling painting. The huge, spread-eagled, flayed animal is placed against a free- flowing background of blacks and dark blues. The huge chunk of meat is painted in rich reds, blues, and yellows, with a brush stroke is bold and intense.

217Tuchman, 15 218Wheeler, 68. 219Ibid. 220Werner, 94.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 55 Another painting with subject and meaning emotionally laden with shtetl-culture significance is the earlyDog and Forks (date unknown). The dog was feared in the shtetl because it was associated with violence. Dogs were used by anti-semites to scare and attack Jews during the frequent Pogroms. In this overtly cruel painting, Soutine depicts a dog with his stomach gaping open, held apart by human-hand-like forks. Once again, Soutine may have chosen to portray a subject fraught with the anxiety instilled in his youth. When Soutine arrived in Paris in 1912, he was surrounded by artists involved in such bold, new movements as Cubism and Fauvism. Although he never identified with any specific movement, his use of color, perspective and symbolism indicate that the artistic ferment surrounding him affected his stylistic development. But the one artist whom his work and personality resembles the most is Vincent Van Gogh, though Soutine declared that he did not like Van Gogh’s work.221 Both men portrayed themselves artistically with ungainly features. They did not care for the company of the upper class, but felt more comfortable with peasants and village people. They both felt uncomfortable with women and never married. They were quite similar in their aesthetics as well as working habits. They painted feverishly, with thick paint strokes, attacking the canvas like madmen. Both used color quite arbitrarily, and their painting was the means with which they fought recurrent bouts of deep depression. But, as opposed to Van Gogh, Soutine avoided any method of work that might come close to a system or order, or that required the least bit of discipline or self-restraint. He was only interested in the expression of his feelings. His paintings became revealing self portraits, whatever the subject matter might have been: still life, portraiture, or landscape. While this comparison to Van Gogh does not shed light on Soutine's Judaic imagery in his paintings, it is

221Werner, 10.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 56 important in establishing his relationship to the style and working methods of his contemporaries. The actual self-portraits that Soutine painted do not give the viewer an objective notion of what he looked like, but they exude his feelings of self-hatred and alienation. Between 1918 and 1923 Soutine painted several self-portraits.222 The most famous of these, Self Portrait (1918) currently in the private collection of Henry Pearlman, is characterized by bright reds and greens, reminiscent of a famous Van Gogh self portrait. In this painting, Soutine's pose is directly frontal, with a fixed gaze, and gives the viewer an impression of rigid concentration. Another self portrait,Self Portrait, painted about 1923, currently at the Musee Municipal d’Art Moderne in Paris is, according to biographer Maurice Tuchman, "a pitiless, ruthless work, ridden with self-contempt."223 In this painting, the artist is seated against an indistinct green and brown background. As in all his self portraits, the fact that his hands are eliminated is very significant in the light of the importance which the hands have to a painter. Soutine exaggerated his features to the point that they almost become grotesque. His nose is enormous and deformed, and his lower lip, painted in bright red, is huge and pendulous. His eyes are miniscule, his one visible ear stands out from his head like an elbow, and his shoulders are hunched as though he is extremely uncomfortable. Judging from reproductions of photographs, Soutine was a handsome man. Yet this painting is like an outpouring of self- hatred. The very ugliness of this picture makes it a work of art which cannot easily be forgotten. And, while it expresses Soutine's unhappiness, it also exudes the energy and strength he needed to face the hardships of life. Soutine usually painted his models frontally, except in a series of praying Jews painted in Ceret.224 The act of praying is particularly suited to a profile view, because a praying person is

222Ibid„ 76. 223Tuchman, 33. 224Werner, 58.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 57 detached from the viewer.225 In these paintings, all of which are entitled PrayingMan, the entire figure is transformed into a red, flame-like shape, recalling the common shtetl vision of God as a non­ material, ever present, flame-like substance.Praying Man (1 9 2 1 ) depicts a man praying with his head tilted back and his eyes half shut. This image was probably influenced by Soutine's recollection of men ritually swaying back and forth as they prayed in the Orthodox synagogue of his native town. As elsewhere in Soutine's work, bone structure, flesh and muscles are obliterated by clothing; this, too is related to the attitude of the shtetl Jew, who often treated everything material as unimportant and even irritating, and put emphasis on the immaterial, intellectual and spiritual.226 Soutine also did several paintings depicting young children. He seems to have been more at ease painting children than adults. Return from School (1939) depicts two young children walking toward the viewer on a country road that extends into the distance, leading to a wooded area. The trees form a band where the road ends. Flowers, blades of grass and foliage are agitated by a strong wind. This painting was done toward the end of Soutine's life, when Europe was engulfed in World War II, and when Occupied France could no longer offer any security to him. Monroe Wheeler, in his autobiography of Soutine, commented:

Perhaps in that twilight of his life, in that eclipse in the life of his adopted county, children two by two in brotherhood or friendship may have seemed to him an image of the condition of all human beings on earth, more acceptable than any other ideal furnished to his mind by patriotism, or religion, or romantic love.227

225Tuchman,33. 226Werner, 58. 227 Wheeler, 109.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 58 There are other representations of children, very different than this one. In a painting of two boys resting upon a log, the atmosphere is sinister, implying something about the unhappiness of children left to their own devices. InGirl in Polka Dot Dress (1942), a mysterious figure of a little girl leans upon a fence, and in the distance a row of tree-trunks evokes an image of prison bars. Once again, these may paintings reflect Soutine's feelings of abandonment, imprisonment and insecurities that he suffered in his youth. Thus, Soutine's paintings are deeply rooted in his experiences with Jewish life in the shtetl. His memories of Judaic rituals and ceremonies never left him, and led to the series of paintings of fowl and beef that are such strong components of his work. Noisy evenings with his family and friends were transformed into emotional and intense scenes of nature and still lifes. Likewise, Soutine's anger at the poverty and restrictions of his Judaic upbringing in the shtetl were transformed into dark and forboding works that mock the rituals of shtetl life. His art drew from, and often rebelled against, the traditions passed down from generation to generation, Therefore his art cannot be totally understood without knowledge of the context of his early life.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

Both Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine worked to transform their childhood memories and the influences of their Judaic heritage into concrete, visual images on canvas. Although the strict Mosaic injunctions and extreme poverty of the shtetl were overriding factors militating against the pursuit of art, their inner necessity prevailed, and resulted in the creation of numerous masterpieces that now hang in museums and private collections all over the world. While the artwork they created was different, both artists' work was deeply rooted in their Judaic heritage, and cannot be understood completely without some knowledge of their culture and the context in which their work was created. Chagall’s and Soutine's artwork needs to be viewed in light of its cultural context. Instead, analysis of their paintings has focused on placing them into specific periods and genres, leaving the viewer without a basic understanding of the symbolism in their art.228 Marc Chagall's culture and his memories of his life in the shtetl were a constant source of inspiration for him. He developed a specific set of symbols and iconography that allowed him to transform his personal life experiences to a level of universal significance. Thus, the menorah, seen so often in his paintings, becomes a symbol of Judaism's defiance against the forces of destruction. The Torah is a symbol of suffering and exile, the Crucifix a symbol of Jewish martyrdom, the fiddier on the roof a legendary figure and a direct reference to his grandfather, and the cow symbolizes the nurturing mother, rural security and in some cases, suffering. Each of these symbols became the means by which Chagall

228Kampf, 6. 59

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 60 related his experiences of life in the shtetl, where Jewish life had formed the core of his existence.229 While Chagall looked back at his life in the shtetl nostalgically and lovingly, Soutine felt nothing but bitterness and hatred toward his stifling religion and abusive family, which resulted in the creation of many disturbing, yet moving, paintings. His rigid upbringing instilled in him a need to revolt against the Judaic laws and Mosaic restrictions that had shaped his youth. Thus, in direct defiance of the Judaic dietary laws, he painted a series of animal carcasses which he drenched in blood and hung for days. His painting of the female nude was also a violation of the Judaic rules against witnessing nakedness, and his paintings of dead fowl are a direct attack against, and a visual commentary on, the shtetl ritual of absolution. While their paintings are very different in style, the works of Chagall and Soutine share similarities. Both artists' paintings reflect the emotional intensity of shtetl culture, and the Hasidic philosophy of the importance of spontaneous emotion. In Chagall's art, this emotionalism is evident in his use of floating forms and vibrating colors. B. Aronson, the author of Paths of Jewish Painting. 1919 wrote: "Chagall's dynamism is the very dynamism of the Hasidic dance. Like the dance, it is not a brutal outbreaking, but a sinking into one's inmost depths."230 In Soutine's art this emotionalism is seen in his characteristically vigorous animation of the canvas surface and his thick, flowing use of color. Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine were story tellers. Through their art, they told us of their lives, of themselves and the events that shaped them. Pablo Picasso said: "One is always the child of one's country."231 In the cases of Chagall and Soutine, this is true. Chagall lovingly embraced his childhood and attempted to recreate it through his paintings. As much as Soutine rebelled against his

229Meyer, 135. 230Ibid., 15. 231Le Targat, 7.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 61 upbringing, he could never escape it and reproduced images of it over and over again. Both painters were profoundly Jewish artists. Throughout their careers, their art remained culturally rooted in the traditional Judaic rituals and laws that had been instilled in them from their youth, regardless of whether they embraced these traditions or rebelled against them. In order to fully understand their art, one must have a basic understanding of the laws that governed their lives and the evolution of their art. By looking beyond the obvious characteristics of their work, and by attempting to comprehend the artists’ cultural foundations, one can have a better understanding of what Marc Chagall and Chaim Soutine were about.

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