Madonna | Pieta: Marc Chagall’s Figurations of Mary the Mother of Jesus

• In Event: Self & Other: Thought, Theology, Art

Abstract

Central to the study of the figuration of Jesus of Nazareth in twentieth century Jewish thought is Marc Chagall’s 1938 WHITE CRUCIFIXION: depicted as one among many suffering Jews, Jesus emerges as the suffering “other" (Hoffman 2007, Stahl 2012). Following the maternal turn (Benjamin 2018), I study how Jewish thinkers read Jesus’ grieving mother Mary as a site of loss, grief, and survival in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In this paper, I address the figuration of Mary, the mother of Jesus, in Marc Chagall’s body of work, particularly in his RED PIETA (1956) and DESCENT FROM THE CROSS (1976). With attention to Chagall’s simultaneous use of two major Marian tropes - those of new parent (Madonna and Child) and grieving mother (Pieta) - I argue that Chagall’s Mary is caught between the memory of her infant child and the grief over the death of her grown son. In the context of the Holocaust, while Chagall’s Jesus symbolizes one among many victims, Chagall’s Mary emerges as a symbol of the suffering survivor.

Author

• Carolyn Beard, University of Toronto