Mel Gibson
Coleman, John A.
MEL GIBSON MEETS MARC CHAGALL How Christians & Jews approach the Cross John A. Coleman ast August in Los Angeles, I saw an early, rough edit of Mel Gibson's controversial new film, The Passion...
...Chagall had studied many of the classical crucifixion paintings in the Louvre...
...There, in the community of victims and witnesses, the faithful silently wait together for the kingdom of God...
...Still, my hunch is that some Jews will intensely dislike the film...
...In a remarkable 1987 essay in the Christian Century, Karl Plank, a professor of religion, proposed that Christians not speak of the cross's redemption in any way that would trifle with or stifle the victim's cry...
...At the foot of the cross lies a menorah...
...In 1944, in a speech to the Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists, Chagall indicted his Christian fellow artists also: "I see the artists in Christian nations sit still—who has heard them speak up...
...next to the angel are a virgin and child (another frequent Chagall theme), and in a somber right-hand portion of the canvas a cross and a candle stand sentinel...
...In the background, Joseph of Arimathaea is depicted bearing a ladder...
...These, too, bear implicit references to Christ...
...The Old Testament was the harbinger of the New and the New Testament is the fulfillment of the Old...
...Karen Swenson with apocalyptic images...
...to me they resemble the characters of certain religious paintings...
...In a speech to the Jewish Writers Committee in New York in 1947, he said that "the 'crucifixions' in the streets of Vitebsk [portrayed in White Crucifixion] and other cities take on the tragic look of the crucified Christ himself...
...Two of Chagall's most famous paintings of the crucifixion are located in U.S...
...As Ziva Amishai-Maisels notes in a book on Chagall's tapestries and mosaics: This combination was an acceptable one within a Christian context, in which Isaac was a prefiguration of Christ and the sacrifice a prophecy of the crucifixion...
...Mauriac's silence is not a denial of his faith, but a hushing of any easy utterance about the mystery of suffering...
...Jesus is absent here, perhaps an indication that the fellow sufferer is not a redeemer or a liberator...
...The motif is most noticeable in his 1955 painting, The Crossing of the Red Sea...
...Like Picasso and Braque, Delaunay was a collagist...
...Calvary represents a double-break for Chagall—both from the cultural boundaries of his Hasidic upbringing and from the strictures of the artistic world's avant-garde...
...Christ does not appear, but Isaac is placed on the altar with his arms spread wide in the shape of a cross...quite different from Isaac's previous position in similar scenes...
...When Chagall placed a crucifixion in the back-ground of his Jacob's Ladder or Creation of Man, he seemed to invite a reading of his iconography that included a Christian fulfillment of Jewish expectations...
...Last October, San Francisco's Muse-um of Modern Art presented a stunning retrospective of Chagall's paintings...
...sia—at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1912 and in Berline in 1914...
...Christians would do well to stand long under the shadow of Chagall's White Crucifixion, and to recognize that Jesus neither totally subsumes, redeems, nor removes Jewish suffering...
...There the church must ex-press its humility, for, as the Holocaust chronicles make starkly clear, the Lord whom the church confesses is also its victim...
...In Paris, Chagall came under the personal and artistic influence of the cubist Robert Delaunay, whose wife, Sonya, was a Russian Jew...
...Franz Meyer, Chagall's biographer, notes that White Crucifixion was "the first in a long series," and adds: Although Christ is the central figure, this is by no means a Christian picture....Round his loins, Christ wears a loin cloth with two black stripes resembling the Jewish tallith, and at his feet bums the seven-branched candlestick....But, most important of all, this Christ's relation to the world differs entirely from that in all Christian representations of the crucifixion...
...In light of the Holocaust, the cross can only be a deep personal confession...
...They are not worried about themselves, and our Jewish life does not concern them...
...First, it placed a large onus for the crucifixion on the Romans...
...He painted numerous Old Testament scenes which included cross motifs...
...Fall of the Angel juxtaposes a Jewish figure holding a scroll and a monster-like red angel...
...Nor was he unaware of the silence of so many Christians during the Holocaust...
...What did I say to him...
...To expunge the Passion would be tantamount to asking Christians to apostatize...
...In the dark, upper left-hand corner, a cross looms, as if representing a far echo of the Hebrews' deliverance...
...They included paintings of man's creation, the sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob's lad-der, the Exodus, Moses receiving the Law, and David playing the lyre...
...It is not his divine but his human nature that Christ's suffering preserves...
...Here in-stead, though all the suffering of the world is mirrored in the crucifixion, suffering remains man's lasting fate and is not abolished by Christ's death...
...It re-mains for us Christians an eschatological symbol...
...In those years, Chagall painted an expansive series of canvases based on the Hebrew Scriptures, titled Biblical Messages...
...He included it (originally titled Dedicated to Christ) in his first shows outside RusJohn A. Coleman, SJ, is Casassa Professor of Social Justice at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles...
...He suggested that Mauriac's tearful embrace of Wiesel provides us with three fundamental stances that should shape our response to Jesus' cross after the Shoah: silence, humility, and waiting together for God...
...In his preface to Night, Elie Wiesel's classic narrative of the death camps, Francois Mauriac tries to wrestle with these rethe stumbling block to his faith was the cornerstone of mine, and that conformity between the cross and the suffering of men was in my eyes the key to that impenetrable mystery whereon the faith of his childhood had perished?...But I could only embrace him, weeping...
...His work serves as a kind of test case of one possible modern Jewish appropriation of the cross, one from which Christians might profitably learn...
...Finally, Mauriac's tears and his embrace signal a common waiting for the coming again of God...
...And it portrayed Jesus' words from the cross, "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do," as referring to even those Jewish authorities who had urged his condemnation...
...Isaac's sacrifice is here conjoined with the crucifixion, suggesting that Jesus' death may signify a kind of blood atonement...
...etween Calvary of 1912 and White Crucifixion of 1938, Chagall painted few crucifixion scenes...
...I venture the following reflections...
...all suffering is concentrated in Christ, transferred to him in order that he may overcome it by his sacrifice...
...museums...
...In Resurrection, a Jew with the Torah stands to the left of the cross, a woman with a baby stretch-es out her arms to the crucified one, and Chagall depicts himself falling upside down next to Jesus' corpus, as if he himself were being crucified...
...In 1943, he had to flee France...
...Yet during World War II and in his last years images of the cross proliferated in his work...
...Second, it depicted disagreements among the Jewish authorities about Jesus' punishment, and repeatedly showed Jews who were sympathetic to Jesus...
...The cross also appears, notably, in canvases of the Exodus and in his famous Sacrfice of Isaac, where Jesus, carrying the cross, is superimposed on the background, and the red color spilling on Abraham streams down from the crucifixion in the top right-hand corner...
...Commonweal 15 February 27, 2004...
...It can express and embody Jewish suffering as well as Christian hopes...
...MEL GIBSON MEETS MARC CHAGALL How Christians & Jews approach the Cross John A. Coleman ast August in Los Angeles, I saw an early, rough edit of Mel Gibson's controversial new film, The Passion of the Christ...
...In the first two panels (evocative of both the horrors of war and of the failure of the Russian Revolution to achieve genuine liberation), blood-red color evokes the calamity of war...
...Historically, the story of Christ's death and the symbol of the cross are so closely associated with anti-Semitism that many Jews will be understandably repulsed by Gibson's movie...
...And even today, when I paint a crucifixion or an-other religious painting, I feel almost the same emotions that I experience while painting circus people...
...On several occasions (first in Paris, later back in Russia during and after World War I), Chagall experimented with abstract and geometric forms...
...At the center of the painting is an unmistakable Christ on a cross (provocatively a child Christ), with the figures of Mary and John at his side...
...Reviled as anti-Semitic by some who have not even seen it, I judged the version I saw free from explicit anti-Semitism, for three reasons...
...He once told his granddaughter, "When I paint, I pray...
...REPRODUCTION COURTESY OF THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO...
...Finally, it omitted the oft-cited phrase from Matthew's Gospel ("his blood be on us and on our people"), a phrase that has notoriously been used to justify violence against Jews...
...In part because of a commission from his art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, to render scenes of a circus, mmriw many of Chagall's portraits during this period were of acrobats and clowns (like the crucifixion, a lifelong obsession with him...
...Speaking of Jewish suffering in pogroms and, later, in the Holocaust, Chagall cried out: "Two thousand years of 'Christianity' in the world, say whatever you like but, with few exceptions, their hearts are silent...
...s the controversy over Mel Gibson's film intensifies and Christians begin the season of Lent, what lessons do Chagall's depictions of Christ offer...
...There...
...But the artist's personal belief in Christ as the perfect symbol of the suffering Jew could not be easily silenced...
...His 1912 Calvary is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his White Crucifixion hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago...
...Throughout his career, Chagall's work interwove spirituality, Jewish cultural life and folklore, and a close dialogue with the avant-garde...
...German museums were ordered to remove his work, and three of his pieces were officially designated degenerative art...
...Thus he shrank from the antihuman tendencies he discerned in the avant-garde...
...Chagall stated unequivocally: "If I were not a Jew (with the content I put into that word), I wouldn't have been an artist or I would be a different artist altogether...
...Calvary is a striking canvas on several counts...
...In this early canvas, he deploys the de-constructive strategy of cubism, but without following either cubism's eschewing of cultural references or its increasingly nonrepresentational and self-contained character...
...Christians would do well to stand long under the shadow of Chagall's White Crucifixion, and to recognize that Jesus neither totally subsumes, redeems, nor removes Jewish suffering...
...It was not a combination which would have been acceptable in the Knesset, and Chagall was counseled against it...
...In White Crucifixion, Jewish symbols abound...
...Here he is—he is hanging here on the gallows...
...Perhaps significantly, the third panel, Liberation, depicts Jewish scenes of the family, the Sabbath, a marriage ceremony, a fiddler, all in brighter, more radiant colors...
...The only hope lies in divine and human love...
...W hile Jewish reaction to Chagall's crucifixion scenes, during and immediately after the war, generally accepted his crucifixion motif as a nonmessianic symbol of Jewish martyrdom and suffering, his later work remains more controversial...
...Jesus is not the only one suffering, nor is his suffering depicted as redemptive...
...To approach the cross with too much faith, to stand in its shadow with certain confidence of Easter light, is finally to confront no cross at all...
...He reminds Christians that the cross embodies both an already and a not yet...
...Plank warned that "in a world of victims, our language of victory—the language of redemption—may alienate, echoing only the speech of oppressors...
...For him, the removal of figurative aspects from painting was tantamount to a desire to make a world without God...
...This crucified Christ-child wears a Jewish prayer shawl for a loin cloth...
...As St...
...Paul put it, the cross shatters all pretentious illusions about strength, wisdom, and power (1 Cor 1:18-31...
...In reading Night, Mauriac came to understand that the cross remains a symbol that scandalizes—especially when employed as a sign of power and triumphalism—and that it continues to be a stumbling block...
...However, most Jewish thinkers understand that the Passion is too central to the Gospels and too dear to Christians...
...Chagall also wove his Isaac-Christ imagery into a tapestry, Exodus, commissioned for the Knesset in Jerusalem...
...Still, Christians do need tutoring, as James Carroll made clear in Constantine's Sword...
...Humility beBecause of the way the cross has been misused, it is a problematic icon...
...Chagall once put it this way: "I have always considered clowns, acrobats, and actors as tragically human...
...Calvary, with its floating blocks of greens and reds and abstract forms, has a more distinctive cubist character than most of Chagall's later paintings...
...During the Crusades and up to and including our times, it has too often served as an abetment for those who accuse Jews of being Christ-killers...
...In the book, Wiesel describes his horror at witnessing three hangings (one of a young boy), and the plangent query of a man behind him asking: "Where is God now...
...Amid the creation which groans for redemption, the church must stand as if before Easter, open to its in-breaking, but unassuming of its prerogative...
...Did I affirm that comes the apt response, because in the shadow of the cross, all of us stand as guilty bystanders...
...These two works posit the idea that the persecution of the Jewish people will continue, but the luminous figure of Jesus on the cross dominates both...
...Wiesel attests that as he looked on, he heard a voice within him answering: "Where is he...
...The picture is unmistakably suffused with a figurative and iconic religious significance...
...Yet, paradoxically, it was to the crucified Christ that Chagall turned as a universal symbol of suffering, and to which he conjoined the anguish and loss of the Jews...
...It can never presume to speak for any other victim, or to impose its symbolic power on an unwilling other...
...During the war and in its immediate aftermath, Chagall executed his famous triptych, Resistance, Resurrection, and Liberation...
...Much the same image of a Jewish, yet nonmessianic, Jesus is found in Yellow Crucifixion (1943), now at the Pompidou Center in Paris...
...The fragmentation in his cubist technique in no way obliterates the clear narrative of the cross...
...In an address relayed to the Jewish people of Paris in 1946, Chagall spoke poignantly of Jewish suffering: "We lost our dear ones...
...During the same period, Chagall reworked a canvas first begun in 1923, Fall of the Angel, which teems MARC CHAGALL, WHITE CRUCIFIXION, 1938, GIFT OF ALFRED S. ALSCHULER, U ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK / ADAGP, PARIS...
...His longtime friend, the Catholic convert Raissa Maritain, said that "with a sure instinct, he showed in each of his Christ paintings the indestructible link between the Old Testament and the New...
...In fact, Chagall included her quote in the catalogue of one of his retrospectives...
...We are seeking them up above in the clouds...
...alities...
...Still, he rejected both pure cubism and Malevich's suprematism, which exalted the "supremacy of pure feeling" over any effort at the representation of reality...
...Meyer conveys its tone: "For Chagall, suffering remains man's lasting fate...
...In Resistance, a violent fire devastates a Russian village while a seemingly helpless victim—Christhangs at the center...
...For Chagall, the cross became a way to express his deep, inexpressible grief for the mass murder of his fellow Jews...
...Moreover, they see the cross as inseparable from the idea of supersessionism, the belief that the new covenant in Christ simply annuls God's original covenant with his people Israel...
...A synagogue burns and the painting shows the torching of Torah scrolls, the lamentation of Jewish elders, and fleeing Jewish figures...
...In the period between 1938 (the year of Kristallnacht) and the end of World War If, Chagall (1887-1985), the Russian-born surrealist, obsessed about Jesus as a sacrificed Jew and as a symbol of humanity's suffering...
...Again, Chagall pictures him encircled by a group of fleeing, suffering Jews...
...In many of his wartime paintings, Chagall abandoned his bright colors (reminiscent of Matisse's blues, pastels, and yellows) for a more somber palette of reds and blacks...
...For Chagall, abstract art was a product of a mechanistic world that lacked a sense of God...
...Because of the way the cross has been misused, it is a problematic icon...
...Chagall was a victim of Nazis persecution...
...It is only we—without them...
...Strangely, The Passion has drawn me to a reconsideration and greater appreciation of Marc Chagall's multiple renditions of the crucifixion...
...What might we learn from this quintessential Jewish artist about the iconic significance of the cross...
...Where has she journeyed from, she dispossessed of all hands hold, companioned only by the fair wind of memory?—in desert quiet a windmill's piston creaks to prophecy the small cry of water in the dust, or the duet of a raven echoing its martinal voice and shadow on river, on canyon wall...
...During the Crusades and up to and including our times, it has too often served as an abetment for those who accuse Jews of being Christ-killers...
...Our house is empty, even when we are in it...
...Mauriac's words to the young Wiesel serve as a clue to how Jews and Christians can look together at the cross and at the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust: And I who believe that God is love, what answer could I give my young questioner, whose dark eyes still held the reflection of that angelic sadness which had appeared one day upon the face of the hanged child...
...No one can remain complacent when confronted by another's suffering...
...Some respected Jewish thinkers find the symbol of the cross irredeemable...
...A deeply spiritual man, he was not disturbed when his art was dubbed Commonweal 12 February 27, 2004 too mystical...
...We are crying and cannot cry them out of our system...
...Always she's the alien in a male nation, papers disheveled, visa date blurred, her strategies for sanctuary require that she barter self for place within the borders or else, misfit, illegal, grow lean upon her loneliness, a susurrus of shadow at the limits...
...It is too laden with historical misuse and anti-Semitic provocation...
...Did I speak of that other Israeli, his brother, who may have resembled him—the Crucified, whose cross has conquered the world...
...After the Russian revolution, for example, he worked with abstract expressionist Kazimir Malevich and included suprematism motifs in his famous murals for a Jewish theater in Moscow...
...Moreover, as Chagall's many crucifixions demonstrate, the symbol of the cross is not inherently anti-Semitic...
...Its scale, and the multiple preparatory sketches Chagall executed for it, indicates that he saw it as a particularly important painting...
...As a consequence, they think that Christians should simply excise the Passion narrative from their A Commonweal 14 February 27, 2004 Scriptures and suppress representations of the cross in their churches...
...Only in the free artistic air of Paris, and far from his boyhood shtetl, could Chagall have ventured such a painting...
...Commonweal 13 February 27, 2004 What Woman Has a Country...
...Although not tempted to become a Christian, he cultivated a genuine reverence for Christ and once averred: "For me, Christ was a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the modern world," Later, he told his son, David, that he saw Jesus in the line of the great Jewish prophets...
...What woman has a country...
...On the cross, Jesus wears the phylacteries of a devout Jew and holds the Torah scroll in his right hand...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 4
