Estate of the artist, Saint-Paul de Vence
Jean Francois Gobbi, France 
Acquired from the above

This work is in very good condition. The board is sound. Colors are bright and fresh. Under UV light some original pigments fluoresce but no inpainting is apparent.
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Le Christ en croix is an excellent example of the enduring fascination that the theme of the cruxifixion held for Chagall. It was a subject that dominated the artist’s work during World War II, where he successfully adapted a Christian theme, the image of Jesus on the cross, to symbolize the persecution of the Jews in the Holocaust. His works during this period—many of which were painted in New York where he had taken refuge in 1941 with the support of Museum of Modern Art, New York director Alfred Barr—were full of anguish and despair in the face of the horrors of the Holocaust, and a world away from the more serene and dreamlike imagery for which the artist is best known.

This work was not in fact painted in his wartime period but forty years later, by which time he was settled in Vence in the South of France, demonstrating that even in this later period of great stability and serenity in Chagall’s life, he was still haunted by the horrific atrocities committed to Jews. In line with many of his other depictions of the theme, Jesus is here portrayed as resolutely Jewish, wearing a striped prayer shawl around his waist, as opposed to the plain loin cloth we associate with Christian representations of the subject. This work, dominated as it is by the frontal Christ pushed against the picture plane, is also exemplary of the artist’s confident and bold use of color as well as his celebrated dreamlike imagery, on show here in the blue goat flying above the rooftops.