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Chagall Continued from Page 1
Louis E. Stern.

Stern, born in Balta, Russia,
in 1886, was raised in Vineland,
New Jersey, and went to law
school at the University of
Pennsylvania. He practiced
international law in Atlantic
City, Newark, New Jersey, and
New York, and amassed a consid-
erable art collection, including
many works by Chagall, who
became a personal friend.

When Stern died in 1962,
some of his art collection went
to the Brooklyn Museum and
the Museum of Modern Art,
while his art library went
to Rutgers University. But
the bulk of the collection,
including “Purim,” was left to
the PMA, where it hangs today
in Gallery 267a. l
Marc Chagall in 1941
Carl Van Vetchen/Library of Congress/
Wikimedia Commons
Chagall was in high demand
when he painted “Purim” in
1916. Back in his hometown of
Vitebsk in present-day Belarus
after nearly a decade in St.

Petersburg and Paris, Chagall
was fresh off of successful exhibi-
tions in Berlin and Moscow and
snared a commission from the
Petrograd Jewish Society for
the Promotion of the Arts.

The society tasked him with
creating large-scale murals of
religious festivals for a Jewish
secondary school attached to
the city’s main synagogue.

“Purim,” a study Chagall
painted in preparation, depicts
a man and a woman as they
prepare to exchange gifts for
the holiday; the word “Purim”
is written in Hebrew in the
corner of the study.

“He had gotten connected
with these artists who were
really very interested in
exploring Jewish visual tradi-
tions, among others, in order
to create a kind of authenti-
cally Jewish modern art in
Russia,” said Matthew Affron,
the Muriel and Philip Berman
Curator of Modern Art at the
museum. The era of “Purim” was
a fruitful one for Chagall; the
following year, the revolutionary
Soviet government asked him to
serve as commissar for the arts,
but Chagall declined, establishing
a school in Vitebsk instead.

The commissioned murals
were never completed, but
Chagall took “Purim” with
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM jbernstein@jewishexponent.com;
215-832-0740 Front cover of the guide for the Degenerate Art Exhibition, which featured
Chagall’s paintings along with those of other artists.
Tel Aviv Stamps Ltd. auction photo licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
him when he moved to France
a few years later, and sold it
to Dr. Herbert Tannenbaum,
a German-Jewish art dealer.

Tannenbaum lent “Purim” to a
Chagall exhibition in Cologne
in 1925, and in 1928, sold it to
a museum in Essen, Germany.

But as Chagall’s star rose
higher in Europe, so too did
other forces.

A day after Chagall’s 50th
birthday in 1937, “Purim” was
confiscated by Nazi author-
ities for The Degenerate Art
Exhibition, conceived by Joseph
Goebbels, Affron said. The
exhibit in Munich, intended to
denigrate the work on display,
featured more than 5,000 confis-
cated paintings and sculptures
deemed insufficiently patriotic,
exceedingly modern in style
or generally inimical to the
Aryan ideal.

Several paintings from
Chagall were displayed in a
room designated for the dispar-
agement of Jewish art, Affron
said. More than 2 million
people attended the exhibition
as it traveled around Germany.

In 1941, Chagall and his
wife just barely escaped Vichy
France for the U.S. without
“Purim,” which had been
given to Ferdinand Möller, an
art dealer appointed by the
Nazis to sell “degenerate art”
on the international market.

According to the PMA, Möller
failed, as the painting was
sold to a German, Dr. Kurt
Feldhäusser, who was killed in
an Allied bombing raid. His
mother brought “Purim” to
Brooklyn in 1948; the following
year, it was sold to lawyer
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17