Explores themes of home, exile, and Jewish identity in Chagall’s mid-career works.
Marc Chagall (1887–1985) remains famous for his dreamy images and luminous use of color, but in the 1930s his palette darkened as he began to address intensifying anti-Semitism in Europe. World in Turmoil draws attention to lesser-known works the artist created during this period and into the 1940s, a time in which he visited Israel, escaped Nazi-occupied France, and found refuge in the United States. Showcasing more than one hundred paintings, works on paper, and costumes, the volume traces Chagall’s search for a pictorial language in the face of displacement and persecution.
The pieces presented here include numerous self-portraits, art with allegorical and Biblical subjects, designs from Chagall’s exile in New York City, images of his hometown in present-day Belarus, and landmark paintings like The Falling Angel . The catalog for the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt’s exhibition of the same name, Chagall offers a topical perspective on the oeuvre of one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.