Magical Modernist

It was Chagall who introduced Jewish life into the mainstream of Western art. Proclaiming the glories of his people by way of his exalted memories, he would become the master poet of the Jewish world, the Walt Whitman of the shtetl. But all his life he also adapted Christian imagery to his own purposes. (Remember those flying lovers?) He returned again and again to the Crucifixion but in versions in which Christ is plainly an executed Jew, his loins wrapped in a blue-striped Jewish prayer shawl. By the late 1930s, in paintings like White Crucifixion, Chagall used Golgotha as a sign for the escalating pain of European Jews.

But even in the face of calamity, he went on making love scenes, colored sometimes by the knowledge that man is a beast in all senses. In 1939, one year after White Crucifixion, he completed Midsummer Night's Dream, in which a woman uses her blue fan to deflect the ardor of a goat-ass who is but also is not Shakespeare's comic Bottom. We are born partly of the animal world, says Chagall, but sometimes we transform our base impulses into gold.