March 2019 – July 2019

Marc Chagall and the Sacred brings together the spirituality and imagination of one of the twentieth century’s most beloved artists. With wit and joy, the art of Marc Chagall is filled with reoccurring symbols of his own visual memory, childhood fantasy, and Jewish heritage. “Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else,” he wrote. This exhibition includes luminous interpretations of some of his most favorite sacred stories, including original etchings and lithographs from his 1956 and 1960 Bible series. With the sophisticated artistry of a master printmaker, each work is a delightful and colorful interpretation that lets the viewer enter the sacred world of Marc Chagall.

Marc Chagall (1877-1985) was a Russian-French artist born in a Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family near the city of Vitebsk. Chagall is known for his creative work in nearly every artistic format, including stained glass created for cathedrals of Reims, the UN, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel, in as much as the media of painting, illustration, ceramics, stage sets, tapestries, and fine art printmaking. The landscape of his childhood and the sacred imagination afforded by his Jewish roots made their way into everything Chagall created. An early modernist, Chagall saw the sacred stories of the Law and the Prophets as the greatest source of poetry of all time. “The Bible is like an echo of nature and the secret I have tried to transmit.” With childlike dreams and interrogation, the art of Chagall invites viewers to see the real in the fantastic, the sacred in the story, and the color in life itself.