Marc Chagall

(Associated American Artists, Nov. 30, 1985–Jan. 3, 1986)

All your favorite dramatic moments from the Old Testament are depicted in this suite of 105 etchings by Marc Chagall called "The Bible." Executed on copper plates all through the 1930s, the entire set was finally issued in 1956 in Paris by the Teriade publishers.
    The Bible has, of course, been a primary source of subject matter for artists. The legends and history contained in it are familiar to many of us. The Bible doesn't get much bad press. For an artist for the living room, like Chagall, this is very safe ground. His series shows those events and moments we're comfortable with. It doesn't, for example, show David leading his army toward Egypt and smiting everything in sight, including women and children (Samuel I, 27:9), or ordering the blind and lame exiled from the kingdom (Samuel II, 5:8). It shows him, as to be expected for mass market consumption, at his most heroic and poetic—singing hymns (after a battle won), mourning Absalom, soothing Saul with his lyre, ogling Bathsheba bathing on her roof. Even holding Goliath's head, he's seen as a handsome, fair youth.
    Chagall brings his blend of whimsy, mysticism, dreaminess and the ethereal to full power in these illustrations. The depiction of visions and other events out of the ordinary is turf Chagall floats in with Blake and El Greco.
    His characters, as befits biblical and mythical figures, seem weightless, as if light shines through them. They are other worldly. Angels float in sun-touched clouds above reclining, dreaming figures.
    Chagall's floating figures are familiar to us, but in the context of these events of mythic stature, they serve to make the realm of the extraordinary and marvelous more comfortable and familiar for us. They bridge the gap between the seen and imagined. We're in a land where fact cannot be substantiated. All we have are stories, memory and our own shadings of daydreams and instincts for the fantastic. Chagall cleverly subverts and plays with perspective to confuse and startle our normal way of perceiving for this is uncharted ground. The maps are poems and geometry doesn't exist.
    His sketchiness seems almost cartoonish. We can imagine these drawings in The New Yorker fitted with some clever caption. But it's a more careful rendering of line and more delicate handling than is usually used in cartoons. His use of shade—scratching in differing thicknesses of line; figures in the foreground darker than those in the background; filling in the voids with busy, heavy patterns or light, delicate dots—gives these works their airy, floating quality, as if we're seeing something so familiar through the smokescreen of memory and dream.
   For all the problems of perpetuating the blind reverence for the Bible, these drawings, flamed by that reverence, manage to ascend to a higher realm of human achievement: creating beauty, great art.