The Image of the Shtetl in Chagall and his Contemporaries: Symbolism, Imagination, Memory

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In his early, 1908-09 works Chagall depicted his home town as a cluster of low, crooked, wooden houses topped by a little Russian church – an image associated throughout his career with his native Vitebsk. Although actually a lively provincial city, Vitebsk - thanks to such renderings – became, for Chagall’s numerous admirers, the prototype of a shtetl. This lecture will examine the birth and development of this image in Chagall’s work, and the reasons why it developed as it did; it will also juxtapose Chagall’s images of the shtetl to those of his contemporaries, Eliezer Lissitzky and Issachar Rybak, Jewish artists who created avant-garde art in the turbulent era of the Russian Revolution.

Mirjam Rajner, Ph.D., is an associate professor and the chair of the Jewish Art Department of Bar-Ilan University. She is the co-editor of Ars Judaica. Her research and publications deal with the early period of Marc Chagall’s art, and the visual culture of the East-, South- and Central European Jews during the long nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Her book Fragile Images: Jews and Art in Yugoslavia, 1918-1945 was published by Brill in 2019. A book co-authored with Richard I. Cohen Samuel Hirszenberg (1865—1908): A Polish Jewish Artist in Turmoil, was published by the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization and Liverpool University Press in March 2022.