The New York Times reports that the London Jewish Museum of Art has recently acquired a previously unknown Marc Chagall painting about the Holocaust:
when David Glasser, one of the museum’s chairmen, was perusing a Paris auction catalog a few months ago, he found it hard to believe what he saw: a previously unknown 1945 gouache by Marc Chagall. It was one of a small group of images Chagall made in direct response to the Holocaust, after he and his wife had fled France in 1941, after the German occupation and after he had begun to learn the details of the Nazi atrocities.
The gouache on heavy paper, which Chagall signed and titled himself lightly with a pencil in Russian—“Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio”—employs one of his familiar motifs, an image of a crucified Jesus, which he used as a metaphor for persecuted Jewry. But this crucifixion, painted in New York, where Chagall settled for several years, is one of the most brutal and disturbing ever created by an artist primarily known for his brightly colored folkloric visions.
Continue reading at The New York Times.