The Praying Jew

Which Praying Jew?

Three physical objects need to be separated before interpretation begins.

The prototype is Jew in Black and White, painted in Vitebsk in 1914. It is oil on cardboard, subsequently mounted on canvas, and measures 101 by 80 centimetres. The Im Obersteg Foundation owns it, and it is on permanent loan to the Kunstmuseum Basel under inventory number Im 1084.^[3][15]

Chagall made two close versions in Paris in 1923. Chicago owns one. Ca’ Pesaro in Venice owns the other, an oil on canvas measuring 104 by 84 centimetres, inventory 0849. Venice calls its work Rabbino n. 2 o Rabbino di Vitebsk and currently gives a broader date of 1914–22. The City of Venice bought it at the 1928 Biennale.^[4]

Institutional sources do not number the replicas consistently. The Art Institute’s collection history and an earlier Museum Studies essay have called Chicago the third version; the Venice title says “Rabbi no. 2”; Phillips describes the Basel prototype as the first of two later versions.^[1][7][14] It is safer to speak of the 1914 original and two 1923 variants than to force them into an agreed second-and-third sequence.

Titles also move. The prototype appears as Jew in Black and White; the Chicago work has been published as The Praying Jew, The Rabbi, Rabbi of Vitebsk, The Jew at Prayer, Le vieux rabbin and Portrait of a Rabbi. In 2023–24 it travelled under the paired French title Rabbin en noir et blanc / Juif en prière.^[1] These are not neutral synonyms. “Jew” identifies religious or cultural belonging, “praying” identifies an action, and “rabbi” assigns an office the sitter may never have held.

An old beggar dressed as a rabbi

Chagall’s reported account makes the distinction especially important. During his stay in Vitebsk he found an old beggar, brought him into the family home and dressed him in his father’s prayer clothes. The Basel record describes a visiting beggar; the Art Institute says Chagall paid an old man to pose. Phillips preserves Chagall’s description of grey hair, a sullen expression and a sack on the man’s back before he was costumed.^[1][3][7]

The painting therefore does not straightforwardly record a known rabbi at prayer. Chagall constructed the scene. A socially marginal sitter became a hieratic figure through clothing, pose, scale and title. That act can be read as dignifying the anonymous man, transforming poverty into authority. It can also be read more critically: the artist uses another person’s body to stage a remembered type of Jewish devotion.

The Basel curator notes that visible signs of destitution have disappeared. The man sits upright, monumental and self-contained, with a grey beard and concentrated face. His slightly open mouth suggests recitation. Yet no document identifies a particular prayer or proves what the model said during the sitting.^[3]

“Rabbi of Vitebsk” is thus an interpretive title, not a biographical identification. It describes the figure Chagall made rather than the occupation of the man he hired. That gap between person and role is one of the painting’s central tensions.

What the prayer clothes show

The large striped garment is a tallit, or prayer shawl. Its corner fringes are the tzitzit. The small black boxes and leather straps are tefillin, sometimes called phylacteries. One box is placed on the forehead and the other on the upper arm, with straps wound around arm and hand.^[10][11]

The Metropolitan Museum explains that the boxes contain parchment passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy and are traditionally worn by Jewish men during weekday morning prayers. The Jewish Museum London adds an important calendar qualification: tefillin are not normally laid on the Sabbath or major Jewish festivals.^[10][18] Their presence therefore points strongly to an ordinary weekday morning rather than prayer in the abstract, although a painted studio pose cannot prove the precise hour at which Chagall worked.

The arm box is also more specific than it first appears. It is normally worn on the left arm by a right-handed person and on the right arm by someone who is left-handed.^[18] Chagall shows it on the sitter’s left arm, the conventional right-handed arrangement. That observation identifies the ritual convention represented; it does not establish the anonymous model’s handedness, because Chagall dressed and posed him for the picture.

The figure does not “hold phylacteries”, as the inherited text claimed. He wears them. The Basel account identifies the loops in his right hand as the tefillin’s wraps, while Phillips calls what he holds the tallit’s fringe.^[3][7] The painted detail supports ritual concentration but does not settle every object-level identification.

Ca’ Pesaro also identifies a kippah on the head beneath or beside the draped shawl and describes the mouth in the act of chanting. The museum’s Italian account stresses how precisely Chagall represented these items before placing them against a background stripped of narrative incident.^[4]

Religious knowledge matters here because the clothes generate the composition. The tallit’s black bands cross a white field; tefillin straps draw narrow dark lines around head and arm; fringes and loops create smaller rhythms. Modernist abstraction is not applied to an inert costume. It grows from objects already structured by repetition, binding, border and contrast.

Black, white and the architecture of attention

The figure fills most of the vertical canvas. Broad white passages of shawl meet black bands, dark clothing and a background divided into hard planes. The head is comparatively solid: beard, brow, nose and cheek retain volume. Around it, the rest of the painting flattens into angular and curving shapes.

The Museum of Modern Art’s 1976 catalogue called the original the most Cubist, or at least most geometric, of Chagall’s old-Jew portraits. It drew attention to sharp flattened forms, severe black-and-white contrasts and zigzag contours, offset by curves around the praying hands and the firmly modelled face.^[6] That description explains why the work never becomes a documentary illustration despite its observed sitter.

The Art Institute instead describes Chagall’s assimilation of Cubism, Orphism and Expressionism.^[2] The labels overlap but are not interchangeable. Cubism helps account for compressed depth and faceted structure. Orphism points to rhythmic organisation inherited from Parisian colour abstraction, even in a nearly colourless work. Expressionism describes distortion and emotional pressure rather than a single formal system.

The restricted palette has often been linked to solemnity. It also performs a more complex task. Black and white refer to the actual prayer shawl, organise the surface and prevent the exoticising colour sometimes associated with Chagall’s Jewish figures. Small brown, grey or flesh passages make the head and hands emerge from an otherwise emblematic arrangement.

Symmetry is present but incomplete. The seated body establishes a frontal axis, while bent arms, turned head, trailing straps and unequal background divisions keep that axis alive. The man is stable without becoming rigid. His closed or lowered eyes withdraw from the viewer even as his scale confronts us.

A portrait without writing

Other works in Chagall’s 1914 group incorporate visible Hebrew or multilingual inscriptions. Jew in Black and White relies instead on dress and action. The Basel interpretation argues that Jewish content appears not as written text but as a painted metaphor.^[3]

That claim is useful if kept precise. Judaism is not “without images” in any absolute sense, and the painting does not illustrate a doctrinal prohibition. What it does is turn remembrance into bodily signs: the forehead box, bound arm, shawl, fringe, moving mouth and inward gaze.

The scriptural text remains literally concealed inside the tefillin. Words are present as material contents that cannot be read from the painting. Chagall builds a visual work around hidden writing. The contrast offers a richer account of the picture than the vague idea that black and white merely create a sombre mood.

Nor is prayer presented as escape from form. The straps bind the body while lines bind the composition. Repetition is at once ritual and pictorial. The painting makes disciplined action visible without disclosing the worshipper’s private thought.

Vitebsk in 1914

Chagall returned from Paris after his first major exhibition at Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. He reached Vitebsk in June 1914 expecting a short visit. The outbreak of the First World War trapped him in the Russian Empire until 1922.^[8]

The return altered his art. In Paris he had assembled remembered Vitebsk into dreamlike combinations. Face to face with the town again, he painted people and places he later called “documents”: merchants, relatives, streets, religious figures and the effects of war. The old-Jew portraits belong to this renewed attention to actual sitters.^[6][8]

The word “document” should not be mistaken for neutral reportage. Chagall selected a beggar, changed his clothes, enlarged him and organised him through Parisian modernism. The resulting image documents a relationship between lived Vitebsk and artistic construction.

The official Chagall archive also places wounded soldiers, nurses, mourning families and abandoned older people at the centre of his work from 1914 to 1916.^[9] The Praying Jew is not a battlefield picture, but it belongs to a period in which war made bodies, age and vulnerability newly urgent.

Nothing in the cited evidence shows this man praying specifically for wartime guidance. That interpretation turns historical proximity into illustrated intention. War explains Chagall’s forced stay and the atmosphere surrounding the first painting; the ritual objects establish morning prayer. The two contexts may resonate without becoming a documented narrative.

The three monumental Jews

The Basel original is commonly discussed with Jew in Red and Jew in Green, all painted in 1914 and now held by the Im Obersteg Foundation. A 2024 Kunstmuseum booklet describes them as part of a larger 1914–15 group of four monumental Jewish portraits.^[15]

Shared scale and seated frontality give the group public force. Yet the figures are not a uniform ethnographic series. Jew in Red includes a cane, bundle and multilingual names of admired artists; Jew in Green surrounds its sitter with writing and unnaturally coloured flesh; Jew in Black and White suppresses both colour spectacle and visible script.^[7]

The differences challenge the idea that Chagall simply preserved a vanishing “old way”. Each portrait tests a distinct relation between the observed person, Jewish signs and modern painting. The black-and-white canvas is the most austere experiment because the ritual garment supplies nearly all its formal energy.

Phillips describes the sitters generally as beggars and itinerant Hasidic rabbis brought into the family home.^[7] For this particular painting, Chagall’s account of a beggar dressed as a rabbi is stronger evidence. The tallit and tefillin do not by themselves identify the sitter as Hasidic; they belong to wider Jewish prayer practice.

From the 1914 original to the 1923 variants

When Chagall returned to France in 1923, he found that much of the work he had left there before the war had disappeared. According to the Art Institute, he made two versions of the valued 1914 composition before parting with the original.^[1][2]

“Copy” can sound mechanical, but the three works are separate paintings on different supports and at different scales. The Chicago version enlarges the prototype from 101 by 80 centimetres to 116.8 by 89.4; the Venice canvas measures 104 by 84.^[1][3][4] Their close agreement declares fidelity, while small differences record a renewed act of painting.

The remaking also belongs to changed conditions. In 1914 Chagall was an artist unexpectedly stranded in Vitebsk. By 1923 he had lived through revolution, directed the Vitebsk art school, left Soviet Russia, worked in Berlin and re-established himself in Paris. Repetition made the earlier image available to new collections and audiences while securing it against another loss.

The Chicago museum says Chagall often produced variants of works he particularly valued.^[1] That account is more convincing than the inherited claim that he repainted the work simply because the original was destroyed: it was not destroyed. It survives in Basel. The later canvases responded to wider losses while preserving a composition still in Chagall’s hands.

The studio photograph and repetition as method

A German-language study published by the Im Obersteg collection supplies rare evidence from inside Chagall’s Paris home and studio. A photograph taken at 110 avenue d’Orléans around 1924 shows Chagall and his family with one version of the praying figure behind them. The image anchors at least one repeat in the setting of his second Paris period rather than merely inferring its existence from later catalogues.^[17]

The same study proposes that Chagall could still consult the Kagan-Chabchay original when he made the canvas variants. This is carefully worded as probability, not a documented commission or an exact sequence of sittings. It supports the visual closeness of the three works while leaving unresolved which later canvas came first and whether both were present in the studio at the same time.^[17]

The repeats were part of a broader practice. The study compares second versions of Feast Day and The Coachman and the several states of Over Vitebsk. Chagall’s return to an image could answer loss, demand, memory or formal dissatisfaction in different proportions. For The Praying Jew, the surviving original, the changed supports and scales, and the studio photograph make “replacement” too simple a word. Repetition was a way of testing how an earlier invention could persist as a new object.^[17]

Provenance of the original

The Russian Jewish collector Alexandre Kagan-Chabchay acquired the 1914 painting soon after it was made. The official Chagall chronology says Kagan-Chabchay and Ivan Morozov bought works from the Vitebsk series shown at Moscow’s Mikhailova salon in 1915.^[8]

Karl Im Obersteg bought Jew in Black and White directly from Kagan-Chabchay in Paris in 1936. The work joined Jew in Red and, through a separate exchange with Chagall, Jew in Green as the intellectual and artistic centre of Im Obersteg’s collection.^[3][7]

The paintings remain the private property of the Im Obersteg Foundation. Since 2004 the collection has been housed at the Kunstmuseum Basel, where the three portraits operate as a group within a public museum while retaining foundation ownership.^[15]

The original’s exhibition history includes the Kunsthalle Basel retrospective of 1933, the Museum of Modern Art’s 1976–77 exhibition of European paintings from Swiss collections, the major Bern and Los Angeles Chagall exhibition of 1995–97, the Kunstmuseum Basel breakthrough-years exhibition of 2017–18 and Pairings in Basel in 2024–25.^[3]

Some early entries on the foundation page attach incompatible colour titles to the painting in old exhibition lists. Rather than silently harmonising them, they should be treated as evidence that historical cataloguing within the portrait group can be unstable.

The Venice canvas as a material and public object

The Venice variant has a separate conservation history, even though no comparable paint-structure report has been located for Chicago. In its 2020 activity report, the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia records replacement of the frame of Rabbino n. 2 by conservator Giovanna Niero for a Kunstmuseum Basel survey of the Im Obersteg collection, scheduled for 15 February to 24 May 2020.^[19] The entry documents work on the frame; it does not say that the painted surface was cleaned, relined or otherwise treated.

That administrative record gives the canvas as 104 by 83 centimetres, whereas the current Ca’ Pesaro object page gives 104 by 84.^[4][19] A one-centimetre difference may come from rounding, measuring conventions or a cataloguing error. Without a technical dossier, it should be retained as a source discrepancy rather than converted into evidence that the canvas itself changed.

Venice made the painting the starting point of Chagall: The Colour of Dreams, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni in Mestre from 30 September 2023 to 13 February 2024. The exhibition placed its affinities with Cubist and Constructivist form beside sculpture by Ossip Zadkine, then traced possible routes towards Expressionism, Surrealism and later dream imagery.^[20] This was a twenty-first-century curatorial argument about Chagall’s place in modernism, not a reconstruction of the work’s 1928 Venetian reception.

The exhibition’s multisensory programme translated the composition into textures and reliefs so visitors could explore the shawl, face, ritual clothes and light by touch, supported by audio description, subtitles, sign-language interpretation and Braille.^[20] That afterlife matters because the work’s black-and-white structure is unusually suited to a reading through bands, edges and tactile contrast. It also shows a civic museum treating access as part of interpretation rather than as an addition to it.

Provenance and public life of the Chicago canvas

The Art Institute records that the Paris dealer Pierre Loeb sold the 1923 canvas to Patrick M. Sweeney in New York in 1924. Sweeney sold it to the Art Institute in 1937, where it entered the Joseph Winterbotham Collection.^[1]

It was already circulating publicly before the museum acquisition. MoMA included it in a summer exhibition in 1932. It then appeared at Chicago’s 1933 Century of Progress exhibition and the Dallas Centennial Exposition in 1936, both under versions of Portrait of a Rabbi.^[1][14]

Its later exhibition record is unusually extensive: Toledo in 1938; MoMA’s 20th Century Portraits in 1942–43; Chicago in 1945 and 1947; the 1946 Chagall retrospective in New York and Chicago; Paris, Amsterdam and London in 1947–48; and many later collection and Chagall surveys. It travelled to the Jewish Museum in New York in 1995–96 and to the 2023–24 Cry of Freedom exhibition in Roubaix, Madrid and Nice.^[1]

An Art Institute photograph shows Chagall standing with the work during his 1946 Chicago visit.^[12] The encounter gives the museum’s ownership a personal point of contact. The photograph does not tell us what he thought of the canvas after twenty-three years, so claims of approval or nostalgia would go beyond its evidence.

A political reframing in 2023–24

The travelling exhibition’s full title was Chagall politique: Le Cri de liberté. It opened at La Piscine in Roubaix from 7 October 2023 to 7 January 2024, continued to the Fundación MAPFRE in Madrid from 2 February to 5 May 2024, and ended at the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice from 1 June to 16 September. Ambre Gauthier and Meret Meyer directed the scientific curatorship, drawing on recent work with previously unpublished material in the artist’s archives.^[21]

Within that chronological account of war, exile, migration, equality and tolerance, Chicago’s canvas appeared as Le Rabbin en noir et blanc ou Juif en prière. The organisers placed it near Solitude from Tel Aviv and exhibited it within the same project as Philadelphia’s Purim, a work shown by the Nazi regime in the 1937 “degenerate art” campaign.^[21] The juxtaposition encouraged viewers to read the praying figure within a century of Jewish displacement and political persecution.

That institutional framing is historically consequential but should not be projected backwards as the single meaning of the 1923 canvas. The old sitter, wartime origin of the composition and later migration make a political reading possible. The exhibition’s title, archival method and cross-work grouping show how that reading was produced in 2023–24. They do not prove that Chagall intended the anonymous worshipper as a direct allegory of every later catastrophe.

How 1923 became 1914

The date error on the inherited page has a substantial pedigree. MoMA’s 1946 retrospective catalogued the Art Institute canvas as a 1914 oil measuring 46 by 35 inches.^[5] Chicago catalogues and outside publications repeated 1914 for decades. Even some later scholarship moved cautiously between 1914 and 1923.^[1]

At the same time, the 1923 work had been published as Le vieux rabbin in 1924. The Art Institute’s copyright history identifies its appearance in a 1928 Gallimard volume and explicitly calls it a 1923 copy after a 1914 work.^[13] The two dates therefore coexisted in print rather than replacing each other cleanly.

The modern museum record resolves the object as 1923, one of two versions after a 1914 composition.^[1] That formulation respects both moments: the invention belongs to wartime Vitebsk; the Chicago material object belongs to postwar Paris.

The developing official catalogue raisonné is based on archives, photographs, correspondence and direct object study, and warns that dates, provenance and exhibition histories can change as research advances.^[16] The correction should therefore be treated as the best current object-level conclusion, with its evidence shown, rather than as an excuse to erase the older labels through which the painting was received.

Date is interpretive here. Calling the canvas 1914 makes it immediate witness to Chagall’s return. Calling it 1923 identifies an act of retrospection and recovery. The present evidence requires the second for Chicago while preserving the first for the composition.

Competing readings

One reading treats the painting as cultural preservation. Chagall’s later account says traditions from his upbringing seemed to be disappearing, prompting him to document them.^[1] The precise ritual objects, old sitter and Vitebsk setting support that interpretation.

A second reading emphasises modernist transformation. Cubist flattening, Orphic rhythm and Expressionist distortion prevent the figure from functioning as a transparent record.^[2][6] Chagall preserved practice by remaking its visual terms, not by rejecting Parisian experiment.

A third reading sees dignity conferred on poverty. The beggar’s sack and social position vanish; frontal scale and prayer clothes give him gravity. Yet this dignity depends on costume and artistic control. The sitter’s own name, words and religious status remain unknown.

A fourth reading finds an emblem of Jewish endurance across war and migration. The 1923 repetitions and later routes through Basel, Venice and Chicago make that reading historically resonant. It should remain an interpretation rather than a claim that Chagall encoded a single political message.

The strongest account holds these readings together. Ritual specificity resists vague spirituality. Modernist form resists ethnographic literalism. Provenance shows preservation through collectors and museums, while the version history shows preservation beginning in Chagall’s own studio.

Looking at The Praying Jew now

Begin with the label. If the painting is in Chicago, it is the 1923 canvas, not the 1914 cardboard support in Basel. Then let both dates remain active: 1914 for the composition and encounter, 1923 for the object before you.

Follow the tallit’s bands through the picture. They are garment, ritual sign and abstract scaffolding at once. Find the tefillin on forehead and left arm and the straps around the hand. Their presence locates the figure in weekday morning prayer more precisely than the general title does.

Look next at the mismatch between face and setting. Chagall gives the bearded head weight while compressing chair, body and background into planes. The man is present as an individual and constructed as an icon-like type.

Keep the sitter’s anonymity in view. He was not securely identified as a rabbi; Chagall dressed an old beggar in his father’s prayer clothes. That fact makes the picture more complex, not less authentic. It shows identity being performed through inherited objects and the painter’s staging.

Finally, remember the three versions. Basel preserves the wartime original on cardboard, Venice the version acquired at the 1928 Biennale, and Chicago the canvas that crossed the Atlantic through Pierre Loeb and Patrick Sweeney. What looks like a timeless image has a divided, mobile and repeatedly corrected history.