Arts In The Bible And Preaching

New Testament Art forms

The wheel of fashion, which turned Marc Chagall and Georges Rouault into has-beens a few decades ago, is turning again. These two misunderstood moderns are being taken seriously. The rise of identity politics in the intellectual world has certainly played a part. If once upon a time Chagall was seen as too Jewish and Rouault as too Catholic, by now the very allegiances that were said to compromise their modernist credentials have a renewed fascination. What is so remarkable about the work that has been done on Chagall and Rouault recently is that it goes well beyond identity politics, revealing the ardent particularism that these great artists brought to modern art's dreams of universalism. The Rouault retrospective that was mounted at the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College this fall was a revelation, reclaiming the artist's impastoed surfaces and bejeweled color and inky outlines in all their vigor and steadiness of purpose. And the past few years have been a golden age for Chagall studies, led by Benjamin Harshav's extraordinary investigations of the artist's art and life and world, which, perhaps for the first time, reveal Chagall's topsy-turvy universe in all its serrated, kaleidoscopic complexity. A new biography, by Jackie Wullschlager, is at best prosaic, but the show at the Jewish Museum, "Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater," is riveting, and New Yorkers have had the added attraction, at MOBIA, or the Museum of Biblical Art, of a small exhibition focusing on his encounters with the Old Testament.

The last time Rouault and Chagall were widely admired in the United States was in the years after World War II. They both received a considerable amount of attention at the Museum of Modern Art, where Rouault had exhibitions in 1945 and 1953 and Chagall a retrospective in 1946 and a show of the Jerusalem Windows in 1961, before their installation at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem. Both artists were still basking in the afterglow of their early avant-garde years. They were aging bohemian legends. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the all-purpose San Francisco hipster, managed to find a place for Chagall in "A Coney Island of the Mind": "Don't let that horse/eat that violin/cried Chagall's mother/But he/kept right on/painting."

There was also in those postwar years a resurgence of interest in religious experience among intellectuals, and this could not have left the curators at MoMA untouched, and perhaps drew them to Chagall and Rouault. In 1950, Partisan Review published a rich symposium on "Religion and the Intellectuals," with responses from a wide range of writers and thinkers. The question raised in the Partisan Review symposium that most immediately related to the work of Chagall and Rouault was whether it was possible to separate religious consciousness from religious beliefs, a development that the editors saw in the writing of Heidegger and Malraux. There was probably a sense that the art of Rouault and Chagall could offer healing lessons in a war-shattered and desolate world--that here was ...