‘Chagall’s Dead Souls’ at Jewish Museum Milwaukee

Marc Chagall was one of the last century’s greatest visual artists. He’s best known for his paintings, but he also illustrated several books, including Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. All 96 of his etchings for that novel are on display at the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s new exhibition, “Chagall’s Dead Souls: A Satirical Account of Imperialist Russia.”

Drawn from the UWM Art Collection/Emile H. Mathis Art Gallery, Chagall’s illustrations for the great Russian novel have seldom been exhibited. “Chagall is ubiquitous,” says the Jewish Museum’s Molly Dubin, “but this is work most people are not familiar with.” 

The 96 etchings are displayed above panels with quotations from relevant passages of Dead Souls. Familiarity with the book is helpful in contextualizing the storyline Chagall rendered (the etchings are displayed in sequence), but Chagall’s work can be appreciated on its own merits.

Gogol’s Dead Souls (1842) was a satirical journey into the heart of his homeland’s darkness. The protagonist is an unscrupulous hustler, Chichikov, who devises a scheme to purchase dead serfs from their owners and mortgage them. By law, Chichikov is committing tax fraud. But morally, Gogol satirizes the “ownership” of serfs, who were considered part of the landowners’ real estate (like livestock or buildings). What does it mean to buy and sell someone’s soul?

Gogol wrote like a surreal Charles Dickens and Chagall’s painted dreamscapes were a forerunner to surrealism in the visual arts. Dubin calls the combination “an engaging blend.” Both are towering figures produced by Russian culture confronted by their country’s censors but with differences: Chagall was Jewish and Gogol was born in Ukraine. They lived a century apart with Gogol under a reactionary czar and Chagall faced with totalitarian Bolsheviks.

“They were incredible storytellers,” Dubin says. “Gogol had an amazing ability to detail his characters and Chagall visualized them. Both shared the drive to explore the complexities of the human experience. They understood that humans have many sides and can exhibit good qualities and bad qualities.”

On the surface, those bad qualities threaten the good on nearly every page of Gogol’s novel, giving Chagall (who executed the series 1923-27) the opportunity for caricatures almost as vicious as his German contemporary, George Grosz. The ugly psychology of several characters is magnified by their distorted physical features. Chichikov’s ego is personified in one etching; he’s as bloated as an inflated balloon. One of the landlords he deals with, Sobakevich, is a bear of a man with legs like tree trunks.

The black and white etchings, devoid of Chagall’s usual color palette, brings his artistry down to basics. Many familiar elements from his visual vocabulary are present—the animals with sympathetic faces, the Eastern Orthodox churches on the horizon. Some illustrations display a cubist multiplicity of angles; some are left with simple lines lost in white space suggesting a moral void; others are crowded with boisterous goings on.

One of the most intriguing etchings, The News Upsets the Town, illustrates the passage where Chichikov’s plot is exposed. The sparse images are enclosed within an egg-like oval, with a few visible buildings, a lone lamplighter with a single streetlight casting a long shadow under a tiny full moon sending fitful rays of light. The work is “layered with symbolism, infused with mythology. Chagall’s illustrations add layers of emotion and depth and great understanding to Gogol’s work,” Dubin says.

“Chagall’s Dead Souls: A Satirical Account of Imperialist Russia” is up through Sept. 8 at Jewish Museum of Milwaukee, 1360 N. Prospect Ave.

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