Chagall’s Stained-Glass Syncretism

Abstract

1 On the School of Paris, see Kenneth Silver and Romy Golan, The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris 1905–1945 [catalogue, Jewish Museum, New York] (New York, 1985). The Jewish Chagall is discussed in depth by Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World (New York, 2006). A useful career survey can be found in Monica Bohm-Duchen, Chagall (London, 1998). 2 Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Chagall: Love, War, and Exile [catalogue, Jewish Museum, New York] (New Haven, 2013); the classic study is Ziva Amishai-Maisels, “Chagall’s White Crucifixion,” Museum Studies, Art Institute of Chicago 17, no. 2 (Fall 1991): 138–53; see also id., “Chagall und der Holocaust,” in Chagall und Deutschland: Verehrt, Verfemt [catalogue, Jüdisches Museum, Frankfurt am Main], eds. Georg Heuberger and Monika Grütters (Munich, 2004), 124–33; id., Depiction Marc Chagall (1887–1985) remains greatly admired for his innovative painting in the School of Paris during the first third of the twentieth century. Jewish viewers have recognized a world from the Pale of Settlement in his fantasy-filled Shalom Alecheimesque shtetl settings.1 Recent attention has focused on how Chagall appropriated the Crucifixion of Jesus to denote Jewish suffering within the wider devastations of World War II.2 But according to most scholars, after World War II Chagall’s output became markedly repetitive and focused almost exclusively on biblical subjects – forming the corpus that he would eventually donate to the French nation in 1973 for his Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice. As a result, much less attention has been given to the latter half of his career. Yet during his autumnal period the artist took up a remarkable variety of media beyond painting, ranging from prints to murals to mosaics to his latter-day love, stained glass, a traditionally religious medium, particularly in his adopted France. Here, too, scholarly (and public) interest concerning Chagall’s stained-glass windows has focused on his expressly Jewish subjects, notably his famous cycle for Hadassah University Hospital (1959–62; Ein Karem in Jerusalem), representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Although Chagall produced many other stainedglass projects during his last decades of productivity, most are largely ignored. Not only do they require site visits (in part because they are rarely well illustrated), but also – perhaps more significantly – they resulted from commissions by churches to replace glass lost during World War II bombings.3 For all these works, Chagall collaborated fruitfully with Charles Marq, master glazier at the Jacques Simon Glass Works in Rheims. Thus his labors were shared, and almost anything he could design, even sketchy preliminary drawings, would be capably realized in the stained glass. Marq even finished Chagall’s final commission, in Mainz, Germany, posthumously, and added windows of his own to complete that church’s project. Chagall was no stranger to biblical subjects for his art, but his first explicit engagement with such themes only resulted around 1930, when he was commissioned by the publisher-muse of so many Parisian modernists, Ambroise Vollard, to make an etched print cycle illustrating the