Art: REVELATION IN GLASS

Eleven years ago, wispy, gentle Marc Chagall received a tribute until then reserved for only Picasso, Braque and Matisse: a room of his own in Paris’ National Museum of Modern Art. Now, at 72, the Russian-born laborer’s son who first dreamed of being a cantor, then a poet and finally a painter has fused all three visions in what may well rank as his supreme achievement: twelve 11-ft. by 8-ft. stained-glass windows that symbolize in luminous colors and phantasmagorical shapes the twelve tribes of Israel.

The windows, commissioned two years ago by the U.S. Jewish women’s charitable organization, Hadassah, for the new Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center just outside Jerusalem, have absorbed all of Chagall’s time. He plunged eagerly into the challenging new medium. Commuting between his home in Vence, in the south of France and the famed workshop of the Simon family in Rheims, Chagall first made sketches of the windows, cut out models in colored paper and fabrics to simulate the design, then personally poured the acid on the glass to achieve the precise, subtle gradations of color he sought. “He was constantly correcting, changing,” said Craftsman-Collaborator Charles Marq, “asking the impossible which in the end always became possible.”

The Jewish religion forbids portraying human images in religious art. But Chagall has populated his Bible land with swirling stars, delicate flowers and prancing animals ever since he was a boy singing in the synagogue of Vitebsk. To these personal images, Chagall added clues he found in Moses’ instructions in Exodus that a dozen precious gems be engraved with the names of the twelve tribes. Chagall suffused each window with a single brilliant color on which he painted Joseph’s description of the tribes of Israel found in Genesis and Deuteronomy, i.e., Naphtali is described as “a hind let loose,” Zebulun as dwelling “at the haven of the sea.” For Chagall, the challenge then became to join image and material: “The material is the material of nature, and all that is of nature is religious. For a cathedral or a synagogue it is the same phenomenon—a mysticism passing through a window.”

That he had succeeded in capturing the phenomenon was as much a revelation to Chagall as to the crowds that last week jammed a specially built pavilion in the Tuileries Gardens to view the panels. He said: “There is the light of the sky in these windows, and the participation of the good Lord. They have completely transformed my vision. They gave me a great shock, made me reflect. I don’t know how I shall paint from now on, but I believe something is taking place. I can’t say much more because I am still under their influence.”