More Amazing Than The Crucifixion
More amazing that the crucifixion
was, of course, the holocaust.
That’s why some believe it’s fiction,
view Jew-haters have endorsed.
Sad fact is that truly it
occurred––six million crucified,
and not just one. Though Holy Writ
does not include them by his side,
Chagall has done this. From the cross
the Christ looks sadly down, an SS-man
observing bloody feet, a boss
who’ll claim he was a minor yes-man
to that atrocity we see
on Golgotha has taken place;
he never will confess that he
deserves great blame. The Jewish race
survived this SS-man’s attack
whose evil has been called banal,
confusing merely white and black!
confusion not one Marc Chagall
made showing cruelty to Christ
who’s cringing on the cross. Some think
they know why he was sacrificed.
I from such explanations shrink,
confronted by the genocide
of all the millions who were killed
with gas used like a pesticide
by people more than Romans skilled
in culture and humanity,
some God-believers, even, whose
world-views saw no profanity
in crucifixion of the Jews.
Inspired by an article by Randy Kennedy in the NYT on January 2,2010, describing the purchase of a Chagall gouache depicting the crucifixion by the London:
The London Jewish Museum of Art is a scrappy young institution, created in 2001 and camped in rented space in St. John’s Wood, off the beaten track of London’s art world. But over the last nine years the museum has been diligently trying to forge a reputation for itself, adding more than 100 works to an already substantial collection that grew out of that of the Ben Uri Gallery, a Jewish artists’ society founded in London in 1915. So when David Glasser, one of the museum’s chairmen, was perusing a Paris auction catalog a few months ago, he found it hard to believe what he saw: a previously unknown 1945 gouache by Marc Chagall. It was one of a small group of images Chagall made in direct response to the Holocaust, after he and his wife had fled France in 1941, after the German occupation and after he had begun to learn the details of the Nazi atrocities. The gouache on heavy paper, which Chagall signed and titled himself lightly with a pencil in Russian — “Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio” — employs one of his familiar motifs, an image of a crucified Jesus, which he used as a metaphor for persecuted Jewry. But this crucifixion, painted in New York, where Chagall settled for several years, is one of the most brutal and disturbing ever created by an artist primarily known for his brightly colored folkloric visions. “Apocalypse” shows a naked Christ screaming at a Nazi storm trooper below the cross, who has a backwards swastika on his arm, a Hitler-like mustache and a serpentine tail. Another small figure can be seen crucified and a second being hanged, and a man appears to be poised to stab a child. A damaged, upside-down clock falls from the sky. The darkness and directness of the work may have been a response not only to the war but also to the death of Chagall’s wife, Bella, a year earlier from a viral infection that might have been treated if not for wartime medicine shortages….
And beginning on Thursday, it will go on public display for the first time, at the Osborne Samuel gallery in Mayfair, before moving into the museum’s permanent collection at the end of the month. In going on view, it will become another of the notable publicly exhibited examples of Chagall’s wartime imagery, like the “Yellow Crucifixion” from 1943, at the Georges Pompidou Center, and the “White Crucifixion” from 1938 at the Art Institute of Chicago. “Although in many of his works Chagall had reacted to events in Germany, he usually did not depict them but used symbols — such as the crucifixion, a Jew holding a Torah, a mother protecting her child or a falling angel — to suggest what was happening there, ” writes Ziva Amishai-Maisels, a Chagall scholar and professor emeritus at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a catalog to accompany the exhibition of the painting. “Although he still used some of these symbols in ‘Apocalypse, ’ he combined them with the reality of the Holocaust in a manner that was very rare in his work. This and the way he depicted the conflict between the Nazi and the naked Christ make this a unique work.” Ms. Baron, of the Art Fund, agreed. “I think it is really a tremendous coup, ” she said, “to get it for this collection and for the country.”
1/2/10
poem by Gershon Hepner
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!
