The generous gift of Marc Chagall’s signed edition of The Story of Exodus, donated by Joanne and Richard Brodie, adds a profound narrative of God’s liberation by a major Jewish artist to the sacred artwork of Christ Church Cranbrook.
Chagall first began illustrating the Hebrew Bible in 1930, traveling to Palestine to capture the landscapes of the Holy Land. However, as fascism swept Europe, his work was labeled “degenerate” by the Nazi regime and publicly burned. In 1941, Chagall narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied France, and he returned to his biblical compositions decades later, completing this 1966 edition of 24 color lithographs.
In this folio, the Biblical history recording God’s saving acts on behalf of God’s people is juxtaposed with familiar tones and figures from Chagall’s depiction of Jewish life under threat of the Shoah or Holocaust. In the process, Chagall engages in a double act of imagination: He imagines what the first Exodus might have looked like by looking through the lens of his own lived experience of genocide. In the process, he asks viewers to join him in imagining what God’s deliverance and liberation of the oppressed might look like here and now.