Patria and matria. Escape in the art of Chagall
As fate would have it, the theme of escape never becomes obsolete. The need to get away from the place of danger is in human (and other) logic: we run for our lives in the hope of getting to safety. The masters of art have often dealt with it, including – and surprisingly – Marc Chagall (1887-1985).
His The Ukrainian Family (gouache, pastels and pencil on paper, 61.6 x 49.3 cm) is an example of this. It shows us a burning shtetl in the background as a man urges his wife breastfeeding their child to move as fast as she can right in the direction of the viewer; farmyard animals follow scared and helpless. It is a scene that has happened many times in the history of that country and is still highly topical.
Why did he say ‘surprise’?
First of all, even those who do not know art will remember that Chagall’s paintings are poetic, dreamy and based on simple, direct emotions. Married couples levitating from the ground from happiness, biblical scenes, violinists playing on rooftops. Here, however, the image is the antithesis of both bucolic life and Paris, both dear to the Belarusian artist: the painting is from the early 1940s, when the genocide of the Jews was underway. There are few primary sources on the work, so we must proceed by deduction.
Let’s start with wars
On the first, Chagall narrowly escaped it. He received his call to arms while in Paris; he was young, poor but happy and surrounded by artists in a stimulating intellectual environment. As luck would have it, his wife Bella’s family was rich and powerful, and so his brother-in-law managed to get him co-opted into his own office in St. Petersburg where he was to serve in an exclusively administrative capacity. This gave Chagall the opportunity to continue painting. In his autobiography, he regretted not being able to shelter those more unfortunate than himself in his paintings. For him, in fact, the subjects depicted acquired transcendent existences on canvas that removed them from earthly ills. Although he was far from the front he did not ignore the drama, but approached it from its more ordinary side. The Soldiers with Bread Under Arm (1915, gouache, 50.5×37.5cm), for instance, depicts a scene of everyday life that one would have seen a thousand times in the streets of European cities.
The communist coup d’état of October 1918 saw Chagall rather sympathetic towards the new regime, if only because the tsarist empire blamed Jews for military failures and treated them as subordinates. He held various institutional positions and among other things worked as an educator in a summer camp for Ukrainian children near Moscow. They had all escaped the massacres by white nationalists between 1918 and 1921 in the so-called Settlement Zone, i.e. that area of the western Russian border where Jews were allowed to reside. Having lost their homeland, i.e. the land of their birth, Russia had become their matria, i.e. their own refuge, a place of welcome that was free of national or ethno-religious issues and instead more connected to their own language and culture. He was impressed by this but could hardly have imagined that something much worse was on the horizon: the full realisation came with Kristallnacht in 1938.
The torment of Nazi persecution
The news of large-scale persecution, often tolerated if not organised by states, was a real torment for Chagall – Jewish by culture and education but not practising -. It was then that he completed his masterpiece The White Crucifixion (oil on canvas, 154.6×140 cm) depicting Christ on the cross wrapped around the waist by a tallit and surrounded by images of anti-Semitic pogroms. Jesus is here the persecuted innocent, the martyred Jew; his face is pale, resigned and now devoid of hope of salvation. Note, in particular, the soldiers advancing with Red Army flags in the top left, individuals of all ages fleeing the destruction of villages and synagogues, and a boat full of fugitives. Above all, in the foreground there is again a woman who appears to be moving towards the direction of the viewer with a baby in her arms.
He produced a more explicit version in 1942, when he had already taken refuge with his family in the United States (The Yellow Crucifixion, oil on canvas, 140×101 cm). The boat of the fugitives capsized to recall the sinking of the Struma ship overloaded with refugees who were not allowed to disembark in Istanbul nor to continue to Palestine; only one was saved. The villages on the right are still in flames and another mother tries to rescue her son.
Looking at these images today opens up several questions
First question: why did the crucifixion change from white to yellow? Certainly yellow was the Star of David, the discriminatory symbol that Jews were obliged to wear. Moreover, yellow, together with orange and red, is the colour of the flames that enveloped the towns, the countryside and above all the bodies. Yellow, finally, is the colour of betrayal, that which the Jewish communities of Europe and beyond suffered from the states of which they were citizens and which were supposed to defend them.
Second question: why is the mother breastfeeding? Surely it harks back to Renaissance madonnas in which breastfeeding is a symbol of life, generosity and sacrifice; but in Chagall’s art, the mother is home, albeit with overlapping identities: Jewish and Ukrainian, German and who knows what else.
The mother’s flight with the infant may indicate on the one hand the emptiness left behind and on the other the dehumanisation that follows. Those without a homeland can do nothing but wander in a vulnerable condition.
Third question: what about the fact that it runs towards us? Hypothesis: in seeking a safe haven from motherland it transforms into matria, and this transformation takes place in the very countries where those in danger find refuge today as it did then. Chagall was lucky to find it: the circumstances are recounted in the book The flight portfolio. What this painting conveys is not only the emotion for the pain of others: it is also the hope that all those who find themselves in trouble may come to safety as he did, and thus that other matrias may materialise.
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