Marc Chagall, the modern prophet

The world order no longer offers the certainties of the recent past. The Yalta cake, divided among the greedy powers, is now devoured and multilateralism appears voiceless. The conflicts that storm the globe break not only lives, destinies and hopes, but also the logos, the language to talk about it: the words to express the world have been lost, and the images to think about it have been shattered. We had deluded ourselves that the second half of the twentieth century was a time of peace, but instead it was a time of truce. The edges of the puzzle pieces no longer match. Risk is an old metaphor, the “chessboard” has irregular squares.

And that’s why the exhibition of Chagall politician. The cry of freedom seems necessary to us today. She opens our eyes. She has just closed her doors to The Roubaix Pool – where we saw it -, to reopen them at the end of the month at Mapfre Foundation of Madridand then in May at Marc Chagall National Museum of Nice. It is not possible to lose it because today we need words and images to pick up the conversation where we left off – the end of the Second World War – and find new possibilities for discourse. In fact, the twentieth century is returning with his tragedies.

The life of Chagall (1887-1985) is crossed by two world wars and the experience of exile: it is bent like a shrub by the torments of the century, from his childhood in Russia to France, from his stays in Germany to those in Palestine and in Poland, from his stay in the United States to Mexico, before reaching the Mediterranean of the Côte d’Azur.

His art, imbued with a humanism nourished by its Jewish and biblical roots, becomes the messenger of a genuinely “political” commitment. And the exhibition certifies that for him the link between poetry and politics is the Bible. Drawings and paintings reveal the tensions of the conflict and his unshakable faith in peace, in a continuous dialogue with the history of his time. The exhibition has the merit of highlighting the political meaning of his work which had long remained in the background, due to a production that sometimes tends to be reduced to a world of dreams. The exhibition Chagall politician he decisively deconstructs this image, and shows us an artist who matures from a revolutionary into a prophet.

At the beginning of the journey you are greeted and overwhelmed by Art comedy (1958), monumental work (2.55 × 4 m) commissioned for the foyer of the Frankfurt Theater. The circus ring becomes a mirror of society and a political allegory: acrobats, trapeze artists and musicians play and play in concert in the name of a Europe in reconstruction. Marc Chagall acts politically because, by accepting this commission, the artist makes a strong gesture towards reconciliation with Germany. In the centre, a zoomorphic cellist figure overlooks a red rooster with its eye wide open, the only one looking at the viewer: it symbolizes lucidity and clairvoyance. This apparently enchanted world hides a metaphorical and symbolic universe with a tragic dimension, where laughter mixes with tears. The curators of the exhibition, Ambre Gauthier and Meret Meyer (Chagall’s nephew), open with this work an extraordinary journey that includes 150 paintings, preparatory sketches and drawings from the early twentieth century to the seventies, as well as 43 written documents, mostly unpublished.

Walking through the rooms we recognize the theme of the crucifixion as present – and already since 1908 -, which re-emerges shortly before the Second World War. Let’s admire, for example, the triptych Resistance-Resurrection-Liberation (1937-1952): initially dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Here a Jewish Christ, surrounded by the victims of the pogroms and the Shoah, takes the place of Lenin who was the central figure of the preparatory sketch. And then the extraordinary In front of the board (1968-1971) which represents, against the background of a yellow-orange light, the black figure of the crucifixion of exceptional modern drama.

Along the way we stop in front of female images that show the tragedy. As in La guerre (1943), where a red-haired woman, precariously balanced on a sled, holds her baby, while terrified by the scenes of chaos unfolding before her eyes: a dead man with his arms crossed lies in the snow, a runaway horse rears up, and a man runs away with a blood-stained bundle. Always a terrified woman holding her child is the protagonist of Fire in the snow (1942) which shows the fire that emanates from the snow as an oxymoron.

Another powerful image is that of the angel, as in The Angel with the Palette (1927-1936) which shows a monumental one with a pale complexion and bloody wings, and La chute de l’ange (1947), where a cherub does not fly but tumbles and falls into the dark night. And what about The Man with the Torah in the snow (1930), which represents a worried man clutching the scroll of sacred texts as if to protect the most precious asset with all his strength. What more powerful image than instability and hope intertwined?

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Colors, images, metaphors offer a lexicon and a syntax that geopolitics, diplomacy or political science in general they fail to give us. Technical knowledge leaves us thirsty, exhausted. The statistics deprive us of forebodings. The “new” world we inhabit no longer even allows us to understand whether we are at peace – at least a cold peace – or in some form of war, for example. The hendiady “war and peace” today would be besieged by distinctions, incapable of inspiring Tolstoy, but not even Sun Tzu.

To orient ourselves and rediscover a political logos, a reason, an adequate language, we need the genius of new words, powerful images, writers, poets, artists. Chagall exhibited in this exhibition awakens the imagination: his frankly prophetic vocation leaps out at us. The biblical prophets in the works on display are omnipresent, just as we are reminded that Chagall considered Franz Kafka his “brother”, “direct successor of Jeremiah and Ezekiel”, in painting the metamorphosis of the world. We reason following the conceptual maps that we have learned from the analyzes of today’s experts, but they do not hold up in the face of strategies whose meaning or final objectives are truly understood. We need prophets.