MA, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Art History
This study deals with a small body of crucifixion scenes that were rendered by the well-known Russian and Jewish Expressionist artist Marc Chagall (1887-1985). It closely reads these works, made between 1937 and 1952 when Chagall lived in exile in France and the United States. Extensive scholarship and The Jewish Museum's exhibition Chagall: Love, War, and Exile (2013-14), have emphasized ways that these paintings speak to the then-current tragedies and suffering of Jews associated with the Holocaust. This study builds on this established research. Yet, it offers a nuanced reading of the iconographical and compositional strategies that Chagall uses. Here, the lyrical-expressionist style and dream-like spatial qualities of his early modernist works infuses his painted crucifixions with the condition of exile. By emphasizing the circulation of the affects of love and hate through a network of signs, Chagall ties the theme of the crucifixion to a life of perpetual exile and to the sense of not belonging that goes with such a life.
As explained in the study, Chagall's crucifixion scenes relate as much to the suffering of humanity and Jews in the Holocaust as to the hoped-for liberation and subsequent failed promises of the Russian Revolution, to Chagall's childhood in the Pale of Settlement, and to his lifelong experience of exile and desire to find a place in the world. Five of Chagall's paintings figure prominently in this study. They include: White Crucifixion (1938), his peculiar paintings of crucifixions with embedded self-portraits including The Artist with Yellow Christ (1938), The Painter Crucified (1941-42), and Self-Portrait with Clock (1947), as well as his triptych Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation (1937-1952). The issues of identity, exile, and citizenship that Chagall explored in these paintings, as well as in numerous other works and writing, hardly belong solely in the province of history. They remain crucial dimensions of life, today. For th (open full item for complete abstract)
Committee: Kimberly Paice Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lynne Ambrosini Ph.D. (Committee Member); Morgan Thomas Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Subjects: Art History