Gabriel Joseph Talpir (1901-1990) is best known as a Hebrew art critic, poet, and historian of the Hebrew theatre. Born in Stanislav, Galicia, he made aliyah to Eretz Yisrael in 1925, where he became editor of Gazit (1932), a periodical for art and literature. Established in Tel Aviv, it was the first Hebrew periodical devoted to the plastic arts – art forms that involve modeling or molding, such as sculpture and ceramics, or art involving the representation of solid objects with three-dimensional effects – and he also published poems, essays, and articles in Israel’s newspapers and literary journals and translated several books on art into Hebrew.
Talpir had gathered a collection of 42 photographs of Chagall’s paintings, all of which I have in my personal collection and each of which the artist has signed and recorded the title of the painting and its date. Also shown are the photographer’s ink stamps and annotations for printing. I exhibit here a selection of ten of these, starting with five from Chagall’s famous Bible series.
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After returning to Paris from one of his trips, Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939), one of the most important dealers in French contemporary art of his time, commissioned Chagall to illustrate the Old Testament. Although he could have completed the project in France, Chagall used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Eretz Yisrael, arriving in February 1931. Feeling at home in a homeland where many spoke Yiddish and Russian, he was impressed by the pioneering spirit of the people in the kibbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and the other holy places.
Where Delacroix and Matisse had found inspiration in the exoticism of North Africa, Chagall, as a Jew in Eretz Yisrael, had an entirely different perspective; what he was really searching for there was not external stimulus but, rather, an inner authorization from the land of his ancestors. Plunging into his work, he immersed himself in the history of the Jews, their trials, prophecies, and disasters. Taking on the assignment was an extraordinary risk for Chagall at the time; having finally made his name in the art world as a leading contemporary painter, he would now pull away from modernist themes and delve into his ancient past.
Between 1931 and 1934, Chagall worked obsessively on the series The Bible, even going to Amsterdam to carefully study biblical paintings by Rembrandt and El Greco and to examine the extremes in religious painting. He walked the streets of the city’s Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere. Chagall later told a friend that Eretz Yisrael gave him the most vivid impression he had ever received, which only underscored his fascination with the Bible since his youth:
I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Since my early youth, I have been fascinated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me still that it is the greatest source of poetry of all time. Since then, I have sought this reflection in life and art. The Bible is like an echo of nature and this secret I have tried to transmit.
Indeed, Chagall described his experience at the Kotel in poetic terms:
I came to Palestine to examine certain ideas, and I came without a camera, without even a brush. No documentation, no tourist impressions, and nevertheless I am glad to have been there. From far and wide, they pour towards the Wailing Wall, bearded Jews in yellow, blue and red robes and with fur caps. Nowhere else do you see such despair and so much joy; nowhere else are you so shaken and yet so happy as at the sight of this thousand-year-old heap of stones and dust in Jerusalem…
Chagall’s Bible Series comprises two volumes and 105 etchings produced over the course of 25 years, with the first 65 plates completed from 1931 to 1939 and the remaining 40 produced from 1952 to 1956.
The Creation of Man, the first work in Chagall’s Bible series, is based upon Genesis 1:27: “And G-d created the man in his image, in the image of G-d he created him, male and female he created them.” At the center of the etching are two human figures, one that seemingly glides through the air, glancing behind him as his wings beat on. In his arms is the second figure, unconscious but ready to be woken. The angelic figure carries G-d’s greatest creation – Man – in his arms, as he floats towards earth, ready to bring life and carry out G-d’s will on earth.
Abraham and the (Three) Angels is based upon the story told in Genesis 18: “… Looking up, he saw three figures standing near him. Perceiving this, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them and, bowing to the ground, he said, ‘My lords! If it pleases you, do not go on past your servant. Let a little water be brought; bathe your feet and recline under the tree. And let me fetch a morsel of bread that you may refresh yourselves…’”
Chagall only suggests the ethereal nature of the angels, as the three celestial visitors do not impose but gently intrude into the ordinary world, their otherworldly aura reflected in their bright, almost translucent garments as they seem to float, their feet barely touching the ground, indicating their divine nature. The elderly Abraham is shown serving the heavenly guests, embodying the virtue of hospitality, and Chagall skillfully uses other visual symbols to convey deeper themes, including the tree in the background, which, often used as a symbol of life and continuity, may be seen to represent here the future descendants of Abraham, promised by G-d, and the modesty of Sarah, who stands quietly and unobtrusively and silently behind Abraham to the left and brings more food to the table.
The angels sit around Abraham’s table with wings fluttering and feet dangling, seemingly delighted with the sumptuous feast Abraham has prepared for them – most ironic since, as we know, angels do not eat or drink – while Abraham, the consummate host, stands nervously by worrying about his guests. This is not just a story about Abraham’s hospitality or the foretelling of a miraculous birth; Chagall’s message seems to be that the Divine can intrude into the ordinary and transform it with a touch of the extraordinary.
In describing his childhood nightmares, Chagall alluded to the frightening imagery of the Akeda (the binding of Isaac), and The Sacrifice of Abraham, which is based upon the famous Binding of Isaac account in Genesis 22, surely draws on his nightmarish images.
Although the story has always been called “the Binding of Isaac,” Chagall interestingly titles the piece “The Sacrifice of Abraham,” perhaps elevating Abraham’s emotional ordeal in his readiness, even enthusiasm, to follow G-d’s command to sacrifice his son over Isaac’s ordeal facing his father’s plan to kill him. The artist shows Abraham gently holding Isaac’s leg with one hand while he lifts the knife (frighteningly exaggerated in size) with the other, but the sudden descent of the angel arrests his movement and Abraham’s submissive eyes are locked onto G-d’s messenger. The small white ram that will replace Isaac as the offering emerges from the dense thicket on the left.
Abraham Weeps for Sarah is based upon Genesis 1:27: “And Sarah died in Kiryat Arba, that is Hebron in the Land of Canaan, and Abraham came to mourn Sarah and to weep for her.” Abraham is shown weeping for his wife, who lies dead before him, and covering his face in a centuries-old gesture of grief and mourning. The grief is particularly emphasized by the artist’s oversized depiction of the right hand covering his eyes compared with the very small left hand that rests at his side.
Dove of Ark is based upon Genesis 8:8: “And he (Noah) sent forth the dove from him to see if the water eased from upon the face of the earth.” The etching radically shifts our point of view: we see the dove being sent out from the inside of the ark while Noah, Na’amah (Rashi and a Genesis Rabba midrash identify Noah’s wife as Na’amah, the daughter of Lamech) holding their child, and a rooster and goat as representative of the animals, who anxiously observe Noah’s bold strategy to try to understand whether the time had finally come to leave the ark.
Chagall’s fascination with the circus goes back to his childhood and to his Chassidic roots, when acrobats and musicians performed for religious ceremonies in the streets of Vitebsk, and to his years in Paris, when he frequently attended the circus with Ambroise Vollard. Throughout his career, he drew great creative energy from watching the circus, and some of his most important canvases are fantastic depictions that exaggerate the pageantry of the performances. For Chagall, circus people – acrobats, dancers, clowns and musicians – were special artists who were emblematic of “The Artist” in general. Like him, they thrilled their audiences, but they did so on stage and with few props; for him, painting is not far removed from the circus arts, which seek simply to please and to make us dream.
As always, Chagall’s images of circus people are at once burlesque and tender. Their perspective of sentiment and their fantastic forms suggest that the painter is amusing himself in a freer mood than usual, and his circus scenes are mature realizations of earlier dreams.
Chagall was fascinated by the popular Cirque d’Hiver (Winter Circus), which was held in Paris in 1926. He regarded The Artist as the servant and instrument of G-d, and he described himself as existing in a world between the circus and the Bible. Entranced by the joy of the circus troupe, he also felt the tragedy and sorrow of their lives, and there are many parallels between the fantastic make-believe world of the circus and his paintings; as he famously wrote:
For me, a circus is a magical spectacle, a passing and dissolving like a little world. There is a disquieting circus, a circus of hidden depths. These clowns, riders, acrobats are imprinted on my sight. Why? Why am I moved by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I travel on toward other horizons. Their colors and their painted masks draw me toward other, strange, psychic forms which I long to paint.
Circus! A magical word, a centuries old entertainment parading before us, in which a tear, a smile, a gesture of arm or leg takes on the quality of great art. And what do circus people receive in return? A crust of bread. Night brings them solitude and sadness stretching on to the following day until evening, amid a blaze of electric light, heralds a renewal of the old life. For me, the circus is the most tragic of all dramatic performances.
Throughout his work, Chagall sought to create his own dream-like world of fantasy where he challenged the laws of gravity and where anything could happen, and the circus stage presented him with the perfect ground for his characters to perform the most extraordinary acts, such as acrobats effortlessly suspended in the air. Thus, The Acrobat (sometimes referred to as “The Female Acrobat”), is a fine example of Chagall’s unwavering passion for the circus and of his pleasure in depicting the visual splendor of the acrobats that made the event so entertaining.
At age 19, Chagall moved to St. Petersburg, where, at last able to see the works of the old masters in the Hermitage with his own eyes, he immersed himself in the theatre and formed relationships with other artists and patrons. He enrolled at one of the schools organized by the Society for Promotion of Artists (1907), but he did not paint his first mature works in St. Petersburg but, rather, during long stays back home in his beloved Vitebsk, seemingly reflecting a need to reconnect with his Jewish roots before sailing out into the unknown world of the avant-garde. What makes these pictures modern is Chagall’s crude, childlike rendering of heavily outlined buildings and figures, an early instance of his use of expressive distortion linked to the expressionist theatre productions he had recently seen in St. Petersburg. To find inspiration in primitive peasant and folk art was not particularly unusual for progressive artists at the time, but the Jewish themes and notes of absurdist humor were uniquely Chagall.
Thus, The Russian Wedding betrays nothing of the academic theories Chagall had been absorbing in Russia since 1907. The painting stems straight from his home, marked by wide, treeless unpaved roads – either dust or mud, depending on weather and season – and low, unadorned timber houses. The melancholy scene is only very briefly animated by the wedding procession moving from across the distant horizon, led by two musicians followed by the couple and the families; only the last one in the procession is in a wanton mood, but he cannot prevail against the gray-brown tones and faded green of the old fiddler’s coat.
Though The Russian Wedding may appear to be a genre painting, it is, in fact, a reflection of a happy development in Chagall’s own private life. In autumn 1909, through Thea Bachmann, he became acquainted with Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a Jewish jeweler, who also came from Vitebsk and who had also left her original homeland. After marrying Chagall in 1915, she became his muse and the source of inspiration for many of his subsequent paintings, many of which he dedicated to her.
Painted the year after Chagall came to Paris, I and the Village evokes his memories of his native Chasidic community outside Vitebsk and examines the relationship between the artist and his birthplace. The significance of the painting lies in its seamless integration of various elements of Eastern European folktales and culture, both Russian and Yiddish; it’s clearly defined symbolic elements (e.g., the Tree of Life); and its daringly humorous style, which was considered groundbreaking for its time. Its frenetic, fanciful style is credited to Chagall’s childhood memories being shaped and reshaped by his imagination, undiminished with the passing of time. Although the work conjures the village of his youth, there are important ways in which it is not an actual depiction of Jewish villages in Russia, which were marked by abject poverty and wrecked by violent pogroms; the painting is not about an idyllic place to be but, rather, it is about the artist sitting in Paris and missing his home.
Chagall depicts a brilliantly colored field in which the figure of a young peasant boy – some critics maintain that the subject might be the artist himself – stares intently at the image of a cow. Peasants and animals lived side by side in a mutual dependence, as signified here by the line from peasant to cow connecting their eyes, and the peasant’s flowering sprig, symbolically a tree of life, is the reward of their partnership. For Chasidim, animals were also humanity’s link to the universe, and the painting’s large circular forms suggest the orbiting sun, moon (in eclipse at the lower left), and earth. The artwork features many classically Chagall soft, dreamlike images overlapping each other: in the foreground, a cap-wearing green-faced man stares at a goat or sheep with the image of a smaller goat being milked on its cheek; in the foreground is a glowing tree held in the man’s dark hand; the background features a collection of houses next to an Orthodox church, and an upside-down female violinist in front of a black-clothed man holding a scythe.
The geometries of I and the Village are inspired by the broken planes of Cubism, but Chagall’s is a personalized version. As a boy he loved geometry: “Lines, angles, triangles, squares,” he would later recall, “carried me far away to enchanting horizons.” Conversely, in Paris he used a disjunctive geometric structure to carry him back home. Where Cubism was mainly an art of urban avant-garde society, I and the Village is nostalgic and magical, a rural fairy tale: objects jumble together, scale shifts abruptly, and a woman and two houses, at the painting’s top, stand upside-down. “For the Cubists,” Chagall said, “a painting was a surface covered with forms in a certain order. For me a painting is a surface covered with representations of things… in which logic and illustration have no importance.”
Cemetery Gates was based upon one of the most beautiful Biblical metaphors of all, the Ezekiel 38:12-14 vision of the Valley of the Dry Bones: “Therefore, prophesy and say to them: so says Hashem Elokim: Behold! I will open your graves, and I will raise you from your graves, my beloved nation, and I will bring you to the land of Israel… And I will place my spirit within you, and you will live…”
The Russian Revolution, which was, according to Chagall, one of the most important events in his life, kept the artist in suspense for years as he watched the signals for the struggle against the hopelessly outdated Czarist regime to grow into a revolution. The words of Ezekiel’s vision are inscribed in Hebrew-lettering above the Cemetery Gates, which Chagall painted at that very time and which, despite the seemingly somber subject, actually underscore a theme of hope and resurrection. A mood of turbulent change prevailed throughout Russia; thus his use of the Old Testament prophecy for a rejoicing in the nation’s future. The early days of the Revolution were marked by broad optimism: the Bolsheviks had taken Russia out of the war, and the Jews finally had equal citizens’ rights with other Russians.
In Paria, Chagall had known Anatoli Lunacharski, Lenin’s appointee to head his Ministry of Culture, and this acquaintanceship resulted in an official position for Chagall in 1918, when he was made Fine Arts Commissar in Vitebsk. Art was highly valued in the opening phase of the Russian Revolution, and it was hoped that aesthetics and politics would inspire each other in their strivings for a more human future. Chagall, full of enthusiasm, plunged headlong into his new position as a professional aesthetician, as he organized exhibitions, opened museums, and restarted classes at the Vitebsk Academy of Art.
Finally, consistent with his talent for inspiring artists with enthusiasm for new projects, Vollard placed a daring new commission before the artist: to effect 100 color gouaches illustrating Les Fables, that masterwork of the great 17th century French poet, Jean de la Fontaine. Though Vollard’s commission was particularly daring – choosing a Russian artist to illustrate this classic of French literature that was so dear to the hearts of Frenchmen – his instinct and faith in Chagall proved spot on.
La Fontaine’s Fables is an important collection of over 240 fanciful poems and timeless tales of simple country folk, heroes from Greek mythology and, especially, familiar beasts of the field behaving like fallible humans; many of the tales are from Aesop’s fables or Europe’s collective lore. Each tale illustrates a moral, reveals a hard truth of life, or shares a humorous story, and they are infused with La Fontaine’s love of rustic life and belief in ethical hedonism, as he reveals his immense affection for humanity, complete with its foibles, vices, and foolishness, conjured up in the guise of farm animals and farmers. Chagall, like La Fontaine, was a rustic and a dreamer, and his deep roots in Russian farm life and great affection for its people and animals made La Fontaine’s Fables the perfect vehicle for his unbound imagination.
Yet, Chagall was not content to merely illustrate La Fontaine’s tales; he wanted to capture their spirit and emotional depth, using color and form to evoke their humor and rustic truth. Thus, for each of the Fables, he conjured his unique repertoire of fantastic images and metaphors, applying them to its subject matter in a fluid and often dreamlike manner and lifting the story to an entirely new plane where it might seem perfectly reasonable, for example, for a cat to turn into a woman.
The work exhibited here, Plate 59 from Chagall’s Fables, is based upon La Fontaine’s poem, La Poule aux ouefs d’or or The Hen With The Golden Eggs:
How avarice loses all, by striving all to gain,
I need no witness call, but him whose thrifty hen,
as by the fable we are told, laid every day an egg of gold.
“She has a treasure in her body,” bethinks the avaricious haughty,
he kills and opens, vexed to find, all things like hens of common kind.
Thus spoiled the source of all his riches, to misers he a lesson teaches,
in these last changes of the moon,
How often does one see, men made as poor as he,
by force of getting rich so soon!
