What Woman Has a Country?
Swenson, Karen
What Woman Has a Country? What woman has a country? Always she's the alien in a male nation, papers disheveled, visa date blurred, her strategies for sanctuary require that she barter self for...
...The only hope lies in divine and human love...
...But the artist's personal belief in Christ as the perfect symbol of the suffering Jew could not be easily silenced...
...Jesus is absent here, perhaps an indication that the fellow sufferer is not a redeemer or a liberator...
...Karen Swenson with apocalyptic images...
...I venture the following reflections...
...It is too laden with historical misuse and anti-Semitic provocation...
...During the war and in its immediate aftermath, Chagall executed his famous triptych, Resistance, Resurrection, and Liberation...
...Fall of the Angel juxtaposes a Jewish figure holding a scroll and a monster-like red angel...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The Old Testament was the harbinger of the New and the New Testament is the fulfillment of the Old...
...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...
...Isaac's sacrifice is here conjoined with the crucifixion, suggesting that Jesus' death may signify a kind of blood atonement...
...Some respected Jewish thinkers find the symbol of the cross irredeemable...
...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...
...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...
...In the dark, upper left-hand corner, a cross looms, as if representing a far echo of the Hebrews' deliverance...
...In Resistance, a violent fire devastates a Russian village while a seemingly helpless victim—Christhangs at the center...
...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...
...It was not a combination which would have been acceptable in the Knesset, and Chagall was counseled against it...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Chagall also wove his Isaac-Christ imagery into a tapestry, Exodus, commissioned for the Knesset in Jerusalem...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...As a consequence, they think that Christians should simply excise the Passion narrative from their A Commonweal 14 February 27, 2004...
...In fact, Chagall included her quote in the catalogue of one of his retrospectives...
...In those years, Chagall painted an expansive series of canvases based on the Hebrew Scriptures, titled Biblical Messages...
...The motif is most noticeable in his 1955 painting, The Crossing of the Red Sea...
...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...
...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...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 4
