Chagall, a cry for freedom
Marc Chagall, born Moshe Segal, in Vitebsk (today Belarus), is clearly one of the artists who marked the turbulent and troubled 20th century. The traumatic events through which he lived forced him to experience uprooting and forced emigration, a condition embodied by the figures that populate so many of his paintings. From his childhood in Tsarist Russia, through France, Germany, Palestine and the United States, to his return to France, a country that would take many years to give him back the French nationality that the anti-Semitic Vichy government had stripped him of.
Exhibition at the Mapfre Foundation
The exhibition now on display at the Fundación Mapfre, which includes more than 160 works, focuses on the issues that most concerned the artist from a new point of view. The project seeks to open paths to a new reading of Chagall's work, in which his unshakeable faith in harmony and universal peace are revealed, through the establishment of glances and crossed dialogues with the tormented and decisive history that was being written.
In addition to his major paintings, nearly a hundred documents are on display, including for the first time a selection of the artist's writings in Yiddish, his mother tongue, in which he expressed his political and humanist commitments.
After enthusiastically welcoming the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, he went so far as to found popular art schools, charged with the study of all artistic currents, a freedom that the new commissars commissioned to brutalise culture according to the new Leninist parameters were unwilling to tolerate. It was time, then, to leave and settle in Paris, where the first commissions for his work brought him a wave of criticism based on his Russian origin, which was yet another symptom of the rise of anti-Semitism in almost all of Europe. This was summed up in a letter to the art critic Leo Koenig, to whom he wrote: "The time is not prophetic, evil reigns". The year was 1925.
During these years, before and after his trip to Palestine in 1931, then under the iron and controversial control of the British Empire, Chagall produced a series of portraits of rabbis and people carrying the Torah, which convey the uncertainty of the fate of a threatened people. The premonition came true and some of his works formed part of the "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art), the exhibition of 700 works by a hundred artists, many of them Jewish, which the Nazis wanted to exhibit in Munich in 1937 to demonstrate the "rottenness" of modern art and its authors.
A journalist's accurate warning saved him from being arrested in France, beginning a long period of exile in the United States, where he developed his depiction of the horrors of the war in works such as "The War". In those years, Chagall reiterated in his works, almost as if it were an obsession, the crucifixion. Crucified Christs with no clothing other than the talit (white prayer cloth) around their hips, depicted as a symbol of the suffering of the Jewish people in response to the so-called "Night of Broken Glass" of 1938. In these tragic and violent images, all the fear of the exiled artist, who witnessed the devastation of Europe from the other side of the Atlantic, is condensed.
Marc Chagall returned to France for good in 1948. He began another period in which he undertook monumental projects such as stained glass windows for the United Nations headquarters in New York, cathedrals and synagogues, as well as mosaics for the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. Works in which he sets himself up as a messenger of peace.
The exhibition, which will remain in Madrid until the beginning of May, is curated by Meret Meyer, granddaughter of Marc Chagall himself, and Ambre Gauthier, who contributed extraordinary research.
For her part, the exhibition's host, Nadia Arroyo, points out that, with Chagall's work, one of the main objectives of the Foundation's programme is fulfilled: "To present the work of great artists of international modernity under a new prism, thus participating in the study and creation of new readings that enrich and diversify the cultural panorama".