Chagall’s Stained-Glass Syncretism

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 stained-glass 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 Bible.⁴ Prompted by this new assignment to turn from his nostalgia for representing his Russian roots, Chagall soon began to affirm his Jewish identity, first with a trip to Palestine in 1931 along with author Ḥaim Naḥman Bialik. After his visit, he declared: “In the East I found the Bible and part of my own being,” and later – on the occasion of the dedication of his namesake National Museum of the Biblical Message in Nice – he told his son-in-law Franz Meyer: “I did not see the Bible. I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible […] the greatest source of poetry of all time.”⁵

This sentiment was echoed by Chagall’s friend, Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain, whose wife was a Jewish convert from Odessa: “I’m not even sure that he knows precisely what Jewish or Christian interpretation of this illustrated Old Testament he shows us. It’s the Bible’s poetry that he listens to that is all he’s wanted to render.”⁶ The Vollard biblical cycle progressed slowly and in stages: 66 plates by 1939 and a further 39 when he resumed the work after the World War II in 1952 (completed in 1956).⁷ But that printmaking assignment truly marked a major turning point in Chagall’s production, which culminated in the shift of subject matter for his postwar output.

With the publication of Chagall’s prints, the American art historian Meyer Schapiro took stock of the artist’s approach to the Bible.⁸ Due to his sensitivity to the range and selection of themes he was able to identify a number of major elements in Chagall’s biblical turn. His great themes focus on three topics: (1) great ancestors and founders of Judaism, those who received the covenant and the Law; (2) leaders of the children of Israel as...