- Person
- Marc Chagall
- Lived
- 1887–1985
- Field
- Painting
- From
- Russian-French
The story
In September 1961 Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations, was killed with 15 others when his plane crashed near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia while he was on a mission to help end the conflict in the Congo. UN staff wanted a memorial to him and to those who died with him at the organisation's headquarters in New York. Hammarskjöld had greatly admired the work of Marc Chagall, so a UN staff committee asked the artist to create it.
Chagall agreed and designed it without charge in his studio in France. The result was a stained-glass window titled Peace, about 15 feet wide and 12 feet high, executed by the master glassmakers Charles Marq and Brigitte Simon. A tree of paradise divides the panel. On one side people and animals float peacefully, on the other people gather around a cross, snakes slither along the bottom and the tablets of the law appear at the top, all in Chagall's characteristic deep blues with musical motifs, symbols of peace and love throughout.
His handwritten dedication on the window, in French, honours all who served the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, for which Hammarskjöld gave his life. UN Secretariat staff paid for shipping and installing the window.
It was presented on 17 September 1964, three years after the crash, at a brief ceremony attended by Chagall, Secretary-General U Thant and Basile Yakovlev, chairman of the UN staff committee. U Thant called it a magnificent work of art. Chagall said he hoped to express his own inspiration, Hammarskjöld's, and that of everyone who had died for peace, the purpose for which the United Nations was founded.
The window, now in the public lobby of the General Assembly building, has become one of the best-known works of art at the United Nations, seen by many thousands of visitors and delegates. It expresses in glass the hope for peace among nations that Chagall, who had lived through two world wars, revolution and the Holocaust, held throughout his life.
Why it matters
Chagall's window gives the world's leading peace organisation a lasting image of hope and a memorial to the people who died working for peace.
About Marc Chagall
One of the 20th century's most beloved painters; pioneer of modernism rooted in Jewish folk life.
More about Marc Chagall
- Chagall's America Windows celebrate religious freedomMarc Chagall created the America Windows for the Art Institute of Chicago as a tribute to the US Bicentennial and America's commitment to cultural and religious freedom.
- Marc Chagall designed a cathedral window at the age of 90Marc Chagall designed a stained-glass window for Chichester Cathedral at the age of 90, inspired by Psalm 150, and it was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in 1978.
- Marc Chagall's twelve windows for a Jerusalem hospitalMarc Chagall spent two years creating twelve stained-glass windows of the tribes of Israel for the synagogue of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, installed in February 1962.
- Marc Chagall gave France his Biblical Message paintingsMarc Chagall donated 17 large paintings and 38 gouaches of his Biblical Message series to France, which built a national museum for them in Nice, opened on his birthday in 1973.
- Marc Chagall painted the ceiling of the Paris OperaOn 23 September 1964 Marc Chagall's new ceiling for the Paris Opera was unveiled: nearly 2,400 square feet of canvas paying tribute to great composers, dancers and actors.
- Marc Chagall filled every window of a Kent village churchAll Saints Church in Tudeley, Kent, is the only church in the world with all twelve of its windows by Marc Chagall, installed between 1967 and 1985.
- Marc Chagall founded an art school in his home townIn 1918, as commissar of arts for Vitebsk, Marc Chagall founded the city's People's Art College and an art museum, opening art education to ordinary people.
- Chagall's Mainz windows became a sign of reconciliationFrom 1978, aged 91, Marc Chagall created windows for St Stephan's church in Mainz as a sign of Jewish-Christian friendship, in a city once called the capital of European Jewry.
- Marc Chagall painted murals for Moscow's Jewish theatreFor the 1921 opening of Moscow's State Jewish Chamber Theatre, Marc Chagall painted huge murals of dancers, fiddlers and acrobats that became a landmark in theatre history.
- Marc Chagall preserved a vanished Jewish world in paintMarc Chagall's paintings of Vitebsk, its fiddlers, rabbis and wooden houses, became the most important visual record of East European Jewish life, and inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Sources
- Marc Chagall Wikipedia
- Peace Window United Nations
- Marc Chagall Presents Stained Glass Window of Peace to U.N. Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.