White Crucifixion

Chagall painted this in Paris in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, the night in November when synagogues across Germany and Austria were burned and Jewish shops smashed. He took the most Christian of all images, the crucifixion, and made it unmistakably Jewish. The figure on the cross wears a prayer shawl instead of a loincloth, and around him Chagall arranged the things happening to Jews in those years. On one side a synagogue burns, its Torah ark on fire. On the other a village is overrun and people flee by boat. A man clutches a scroll, another wears a sign that Chagall later painted over to make the message less specific. The colour is almost gone from the whole scene, drained to grey and white, with a shaft of pale light falling down the centre onto the cross.