The Colors of Peace

King David with Harp, lithograph, Marc Chagall

In the midst of dark, war-torn 1939, artist Marc Chagall feared his days were numbered. The Nazis marched toward Paris, toward the small enclave of artists and intellectuals housing the middle-aged Russian Jew. Chagall hid his works as best he could; he placed his etchings on Biblical themes - the beginnings of a series he started after a visit to Palestine - in a locked trunk and shipped them to a Swiss friend.

"These thoughts occurred to me many years ago when I first stepped on biblical ground preparing to create etchings for the Bible," Chagall mused, many years later. "And they emboldened me to bring my modest gift to the Jewish people which always dreamed of biblical love, of friendship and peace among all peoples."

Chagall was saved by an American journalist, in one of the most extraordinary sagas of World War II. Varian Fry, a classical scholar and writer, met with Eleanor Roosevelt with a plan to find many of the century's most famous artists and intellectuals and helping them escape from Nazi-occupied France. He arrived in the French port city of Marseilles armed with only three thousand dollars and a list of two hundred names. Fry set to work, manufacturing sets of false identification, and setting up a careful escape route through the patrolled countryside.

In a rescue operation unprecedented in modern times, Fry managed to save a virtual roll call of twentieth-century genius. Among the lucky, including Chagall, were the artists Marcel Duchamp, Andre Masson, and Max Ernst; writers Franz Werfel and Heinrich Mann; Nobel Prize winner Otto Meyerhof; and musicians Erich Itor-Kahn and Wanda Landowska. Alma Mahler also escaped, bringing with her original scores composed by her first husband, Gustav Mahler, and manuscript symphonies by Georg Bruckner.

Chagall's works were forever changed by Fry's bravery. He retrieved his unfinished works and began to paint, adding bold splashes of color that spoke of joy, of a deep inner belief in peace.

"Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?" Chagall mused after his escape.

Chagall finished his Bible series, a set of color lithographs, in 1956, and continued to paint for thirty-nine more years until his death in 1985 at the age of 97. The Ray Drew Gallery at NMHU is showing an exhibition of these lithographs through December 18.

Chagall's work shows great sensitivity to his subjects. King David's face turns to one side, captured in muted pinks, a gesture of submission to a higher force. Angels are seemingly sketched with pen somehow above paper, the delicate lines giving flight to invisible wings.

Chagall never denied his religious faith, and the ways it inspired his work. "Ever since my earliest youth I have been fascinated by the Bible. I have always believed that it is the greatest source of poetry of all time," said Chagall. "The Bible is an echo of nature, and this I have endeavoured to transmit. In art everything is possible, so long as it is based on love."

The Bible, lithographs by Marc Chagall, exhibit at the Ray Drew Gallery, Las Vegas, New Mexico. The Ray Drew Gallery is on the first floor of the Donnelly Library on the NMHU campus, and is open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

This article first appeared in the Las Vegas Optic.

Comments

[Jonah]

What a grand story, excellently written.

[Rick]

Very interesting Birdie. Paris was filled with great aritists in those years--many were Russian Jews.

RM

[Jen]

Fabulous - so inspiring! I love it!

[Deb]

I saw Chagall's windows at the Fraumuenster in Zurich as a teenager in 1972. But I was unaware of the story until now. The windows are very powerful.