Marc Chagall and Clement Greenberg: Confrontations in Jewish Modernism

Marc Chagall’s art resisted affiliation with any single artistic school or movement of his time. Unlike the abstract expressionism propounded by Jewish art critic Clement Greenberg, Chagall’s work mixed styles and influences that consistently represented Jewish subjects. Greenberg’s criticisms of Chagall focused on the quality of his work, at one point suggesting it lacked “seriousness and weight.” Some scholars identify Greenberg’s animus against Chagall as the result of Jewish self-hatred, while others focus on Chagall’s popularity and alleged sentimentality as a liability in the art world. This essay offers a third explanation—that Greenberg and Chagall differed on the place of tradition, especially Jewish tradition, in modern art. While Chagall depicted traditional Jewish subjects in his work, he was no traditionalist; his work contributed to several modernist movements and forged a unique set of artistic idioms. Greenberg, meanwhile, associated representational and popular art with “kitsch” and “middlebrow” culture while advocating for a conception of modernism defined by separation from and disregard from the past. These differences extended to Jewish tradition and its representation. Through a selective engagement with what I call Chagall’s “Jewish modernism” and Greenberg’s critical writings, this paper shows how Jewish tradition highlights the difference between Greenberg and Chagall, not because of Chagall’s sentimentality or Greenberg’s self-hatred but their different understandings of how modernism inherits tradition.