Chagall's obsession with Jesus

In the autumn of 1915, Marc Chagall took a short trip from his hometown of Vitebsk in Belorussia to Zaolshe, the summer seat of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shalom Dov-Ber-Schneerson. Chagall, then a 28-year-old painter with a burgeoning reputation, reports in his memoir "My Life" that he had been haunted "for a long time" by "the pale face" of Jesus and he wanted some guidance. Although he had grown up in a Hasidic milieu, Chagall had abandoned religious observance at the age of 13, and by the time that he met Schneerson he was thoroughly secularized, with a résumé that included four years in Paris on the front lines of the revolutionary art wars.

According to Chagall's account of their meeting, it wasn't a profound conversation. He didn't even reveal the matter that was troubling him--his feeling of being haunted by the "pale face" of Jesus. Instead, he asked the rabbi a question to which he already knew the answer: Should he stay in Vitebsk or move to Petrograd? Chagall had already been drafted into the army and ordered to Petrograd. As payback for wasting the rabbi's time, he got a noncommittal answer......

 

In 1950, a monk asked Chagall to decorate his newly built church. Chagall, who had offered his services to churches in the past but had been turned down, became so wracked with guilt that he procrastinated for months, seeking the advice of everyone from France's chief rabbi to Chaim Weizmann.

Comment:

The obsession with the founder on Christinaity undoubtedly represented for Marc Chagall many things. Thre was in it a generous mixture of guilt, rebellion, fantasy, and pure spite.

Why did Chagall ask Rebbe Rashab a question about moving from the town of his birth to the center of Russian Orhodox culture (Petrograd was for a brief time the name of St. Peterrsburg)? Or, was he embarassed to bare the cesspool of his suffering soul to the man of holiness. Or, was he , as he does in his paintings, prefer to speak in the safe langauge of allegory, the infintely bendable medium in which one can escape the harsh light of uncomfortabel truh. If so, Rebbe Rashab rightly evaded answering, for the language of Teshuva is not that of allegory but of profound emotion, shame that one cannot hide and regret that cannot be enclosed in the safe layers of parable and evasion. It is the language of Truth.

 

Chagall's dye was cast. He was going to Petrograd and away from Vitebsk. He did not hear the message of the Rebbe and lived the rest of his life in the fog of artistic confusion and self-delusion. What pity for another lost sou!

Comments

[Aupusher]

I've recently been fascinated with Chagall's work. Chagall's "Grey Crucifixion" is a very powerful piece to me. Here's a link to it: http://www.masterworksfineart.com/inventory/1758. I did not know that the "pale face" of Jesus haunted him. Very strange.

Thanks for this great article.

[avakesh]

I read someplace that images of Jesu that haunted religiosu Jews was a known manifestation of mental illness in Jews in the 1700-1900 hundreds, as psychogenic paralysis and hysteria was common in Freud's Vienna. Stories are told of both Gro and Besht. It is said that a man came to them and told of a dream where his diseased father came to him repeatedly in a dream and urged him to convert. They both directed that they exhume the body and they found that a coin with a picture of the cross was lieing on the corpses eyes. It goes that the Gro know this from the Yerushalmi. When this was told to the Besht, he said that he did not know the Yerushalmi but he knew it from the same source that the Yerushalmi klnew of it.