A Chagall picture book

Associated media

Marc Chagall Drawings for the Bible

This book will delight all who revel in Marc Chagall’s fantastic imagination, here bestowed on some of the most vivid and challenging passages from the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament.  It should be noted at the outset that this is a picture book, really a gift book, with very little text commentary.  While Chagall (1887–1985), maintained a lifelong concern with biblical images, this preoccupation still remains too little studied, even by Chagall specialists, in part because it flourished most during his later career. 

For the most part the painter's early career has absorbed interpretative interest: firstly, in formal terms with its inventive yet intensely colourful engagement with Cubism and other avant-garde movements in Picasso's Paris; but also in thematic terms, where the shtetl life of a re-imagined Vitebsk, infused with a Russian rural version of magic realism, came to form the core iconography of the ambitious expatriate.  Later, amidst the artist's multi-faceted experimentation with designs for media (tapestries, stained glass, mosaics, murals, and book illustrations), Chagall frequently reverted to biblical subjects.

This book gathers and reproduces at full size a published set of Chagall's biblical lithographs, both monochrome and coloured, from the series 'Editions de la Revue Verve' (Paris, 1960).  Disappointingly, only minimal commentary adds to the images, though each is accompanied with trilingual biblical texts in an appendix.  A short foreword by Béatrice Hernad (also in three languages) is followed by an introduction by Gaston Bachelard.  But the interested reader will find nothing about Chagall's interest in particular books of the Bible that he elsewhere illustrated separately, such as the Song of Songs, nor is his unusual attention to the New Testament (he was Jewish) ever even mentioned.  Those considerations still await scholarly analysis – along with so many other 20th-century religious subjects.

Today Marc Chagall has many admirers but as many detractors, who are unsettled by his repetitions, clarity of representations, cheerful sentimentality, and imagery that an era of abstraction often derided as 'literary.'  Both his virtues and his distinctive qualities are richly on view here, but fans will find many delights in the charming simplicity of figures, often seen close-up, whom Chagall endows with vitality from start to finish (the darker side of the Bible and its accompanying scenes – even violent ones, such as Cain and Abel or Jael and Sisera – rarely overturn the dominant imagery).  Figures primarily dominate; landscapes serve as narrative accompaniment.  Some books, such as ‘Esther’and ‘Song of Songs’, receive more extended treatment, while Chagall's signature goats and birds appear in the more poetic imagery of Psalms or visionary prophecies.  Unfortunately, the images receive no substantial individual commentary, only the biblical verses as quotations.

The Chagall scholar, or even theaficionado of the artist's neglected late works, will have to bring a personal interpretation to this handsome volume, without the assistance of detailed commentary.

Marc Chagall Drawings for the Bible is published by Prestel, Munich, 2011. 208 pp. 96 illus, $120. ISBN 978-3-7913-4566-6