Navigate to News section

Yiddish Through the Back Door

Today on Tablet

by
Marc Tracy
March 16, 2011
Detail in The Reclining Poet.(Tate Modern Museum. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
Detail in The Reclining Poet.(Tate Modern Museum. Image courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)

Considering a new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on “Marc Chagall and His Circle,” contributing editor Jonathan Wilson argues today in Tablet Magazine that the tastefully named Belarus-born artist distinguished himself from the rest of his circle with his explicit Jewish themes—and that his inventive use of these are among his greatest strokes. “He brilliantly harnessed his Yiddish past to modernist techniques and in this way sneaked Yiddish culture into 20th-century painting,” Wilson argues. “Because the vibrant visual expression of his paintings carried the stamp of the modern and not the stigma of a dying language, hardly anyone, with the exception of the odd French anti-Semite, noticed.”

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.