Just how relevant is Marc Chagall? With a big retrospective on this ever popular, downright lovable painter now opening at the Albertina Museum, in Vienna, it’s a question worth asking. In the decades since Chagall’s 1930s ascension to the art-world firmament, his idiosyncratic imagery—big-eyed cows, green-faced fiddlers, flying newlyweds—has become, if not exactly cliché, a much-hugged baby blanket from the glory years of European modernism.
Well, somewhat unexpectedly, Chagall suddenly looks like a deeply important figure for the current moment. An artist whose Jewishness was central to his work, Chagall is a bulwark of identity in the current crisis of confidence engulfing the Jewish world. Hostility has come, very quickly, from the far right and far left across the U.S. and Europe, along with the outbreak of bloodletting in the Middle East.
