Was Prospero, forced to flee from persecution in The Tempest, the eternal Wandering Jew?
He certainly was as seen by the artist Marc Chagall, if not Shakespeare, who created the character.

Nearly 400 years later Chagall cast himself in the role in a series of 50 lithographs.

“It feels so poignant to see a man twice displaced by war telling his own story and that of so many other 20th-century Jews,” says Kirsty Rodda, Visual Arts Manager of The Arc in Winchester, a town once home to its own pre-Expulsion Jewish community — one of the earliest, largest and most successful in the UK.

The gallery, whose courtyard contains a statue commemorating one of those mediaeval Jews, Licoricia, is now showing the engaging, rarely seen images in which Chagall tells the story of real-life pogroms and refugees within the framework of Shakespeare’s tale of betrayal, flight and redemption.

Chagall, who was born in Russia and later fled Paris when the Nazis invaded, would not have had good enough English to read it in the original, but the play resonated in his old age.

“Chagall identified with the experiences of Prospero. The terrible storm at sea that opens the play becomes a symbol of the storms in Chagall’s life,” says Hanna Scolnikov, curator of the Arc’s exhibition of the 50 lithographs.

They were a well-kept secret before 2007 when they were shown in Tel Aviv, she explains; only private collectors had ever had the privilege of seeing the set of images created in 1975 for a limited edition of 270 loose-leaf books published by Chagall in the run-up to his 90th birthday.

He created a Tempest unlike anything ever staged at the Globe; in pen and ink Chagall endows Shakespeare’s island with an unlikely shtetl of its own, populated with the mythical fish and birds and high-flying lovers so common in the artist’s work, not to mention a fiddler on the roof — in this case a spirit in the clouds.

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A detail from one of Chagall’s Tempest lithographs

“Frankly, I had never heard of this work when I was asked to write about it and started on my research,” says Scolnikov, an aficionado of Chagall originally approached because of her expertise on Shakespeare.

“I found no books or essays, and two colleagues I approached were even suspicious there was such a work.”

When she saw the lithographs she realised they were much more than a set of illustrations, given the number of scenes never included in the play. “Chagall clearly saw himself as the co-creator of the work, because he included his own name as well as Shakespeare’s on the title page.”

Landing such a large, engaging exhibition by a great master is a coup for a provincial museum. “The possibility of mounting a Chagall show in Winchester was beyond my wildest dreams when it came up,”admits Rodda.

And the opportunity would not have come up had the Ben Uri Gallery in London, where the works were seen for the first time in the UK, not managed to acquire its own set of lithographs in 2016.

“After reading the catalogue of the Tel Aviv show, I approached the university to see if we could do an exhibition all over again,” says David Glasser, CEO of the Ben Uri Gallery.

“But I found a copy of the book at an antiquarian bookshop in Turin, and a donor kindly bought it for us so we could have our own set of images to put on show.” Finding more fans of Shakespeare than Chagall at the London debut in 2017, Glasser is not surprised the work took five years to reach its next venue.

“It’s a large show, and there’s no colour in it,” he says bluntly. “Museums have to get people in, and one colourful Chagall painting of flowers, mythical figures and himself and Bella flying will bring in more people than 50 black and white lithographs.”

But Rodda thinks the power of love resonates even in black and white: “It’s very moving to see he was so much in love with his wife he was still recreating those flying lovers 30 years after she died,” she says in reference to the many portrayals throughout the show of Prospero’s daughter Miranda floating in ecstasy with her lover Ferdinand.

Scolnikov believes an image of Prospero himself as a Prospero whom Chagall has endowed with his own characteristic dark curls, escaping persecution in a boat with Miranda is an expression of Chagall’s devotion to his daughter Ida.

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Another detail from one of Chagall’s Tempest lithographs

he vibrant hues that have made Chagall’s work so collectible the world over may be absent from the lithographs, but Rodda has done a good job of getting colour into the Winchester show with an original self-portrait in crayon loaned by a private owner.

There’s a soundtrack provided by a CD of the music that inspired Chagall; visitors donning headphones are treated to snatches of klezmer and Yiddish song alongside renditions of Kalinka and the like by Russian male voice choirs.

The young Chagall had aspirations to play the violin before he settled for depicting the instrument in so many works featuring shtetl fiddlers playing merrily on while a changing world descends into chaos below.

The Winchester exhibition drew unexpectedly large crowds in its opening week.

“We started researching the story of the town’s Jews in the run-up to the Licoricia project, and telling this story was a natural follow-on from that,” explains Rodda.

However, she admits there was no way of foreseeing, when planning the show two years ago, that by the time it opened Russia would have invaded Ukraine, displacing millions more people, dozens of whom have found refuge in Winchester.

“We are holding workshops this month in which Ukrainian refugees will be invited to respond to the exhibition with work we will show next month in our outer gallery,” she explains.

She believes these refugees will, like the artist, see their own life stories in Shakespeare’s tormented character looking for a way back home.

“Chagall knew the pain of being a refugee, forced into exile from his home in Paris in 1941 and escaping to New York.

"It would be perfectly understandable if he compared himself to the exiled Prospero,” she points out.

But perhaps the work can also be seen as a farewell, at the age of 88, to his decades of artistic output, just as the actions of Prospero, in forsaking his magic-making, is viewed by many scholars as Shakespeare bidding his own farewell to writing in his last completed play.

A Farewell to Art: Chagall, Shakespeare and Prospero runs at the Arc, Winchester until 12 February. Hanna Scolnikov will give a curator’s talk by Zoom on 21 January.
See arcwinchester.org.uk for more information.