On Seeing Marc Chagall's "The Green Violinist"

See the painting

I'm in the Guggenheim, staring like twenty other souls at the Chagall of the Green Violinist, and what calls me isn't the angular tones of purple that make up his coat, or the angry green of his face or his unflinching red eyes but the gray angel nearly hidden in the similiarly gray background that hovers over the violinist's head.

This angel is a Chagall regular--perhaps the artist himself, his arms outstretched not so much to bless as to paint--and the only beneficience in a painting that seems otherwise faintly evil. As he flies above the foreboding clouds and the baying dog, the angel rains forgiveness on the cop with his billy club poised to strike and on the poor Jews hidden behind the dark windows of the violinist's ghetto legs.

Perhaps it is the angel who turns the violinist's feet--one east and the other west-- and thus transforms him to a jester, a pied piper parading the Jews from their ghetto to the freedom of the kibbutz or America's shores. Because of the angel, the violinist becomes laughter and celebration, a wise rabbi of peace who, by the grace of the angel, may vanquish all that is gray in their world.

Oh, how I wish Chagall had given this angel the sovereignty of purple.

Victoria Tirrel