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The Nazi onslaught caught Chagall in Vichy France, preoccupied with his work. He was loath to leave, even when the Emergency Rescue Committee urged him to come to the U.S. Recalls Varian Fry, the committee's agent, "He wanted to know if there were any cows in America. I assured him that we had not only cows but goats too." "And trees and green grass?" he asked. "We have all that," said Fry. "I told him that New York City was only a part of the U.S. and even there was green grass. Chagall was enormously relieved." Fry rescued him from a police roundup of Jews in Marseille, packed him, his family, and 3,500 Ibs. of his art works on board a transatlantic ship. The day before he arrived in New York City, June 23, 1941, the Nazis attacked Russia. The U.S. provided a wartime haven and a climate of liberty for Chagall. Manhattan, where he eventually found an apartment off Fifth Avenue, stunned him as "this Babylon." The artist never managed to learn English, but he and his wife made their home a center for other expatriates.
Hemorrhaging Angel. In 1942, Choreographer Leonide Massine, a fellow Russian, got him to design costumes and sets for the New York Ballet Theater's production of Aleko. Critic Emily Genauer recalls walking in on the two while they were trying to explore the project. Tchaikovsky's trumpets blared over a record player, while Massine dragged Chagall around the room in an unbelievable pas de deux,. Yet somehow the collaboration worked. The premiere, which took place in Mexico in 1942, was a smash success.
Yet Chagall could not long escape into the world of theater and ballet. The disasters of war inflamed him, and in 1943 he painted the Yellow Crucifixion. Amidst acidic yellows and greens, Vitebsk burns, a ship sinks, a ladder is half-posed to remove Christ from the Cross. In his Falling Angel, begun in 1923 and not finished until 1947, the whole world violently disintegrates, with a rabbi fleeing with the Torah and an angel hemorrhaging down through a tempest-torn sky.
Guidon of Life. Chagall, too, was to suffer. In September 1944, Bella came down with a strep throat while summering in upstate New York. He rushed her to a hospital in the Adirondacks, where, hampered by his fragmentary English, they were turned away with the excuse that the hour was too late. The next day she died. It took him nine months to begin painting again; in the meantime, he helped his daughter translate Bella's own memoirs of Russia, Burning Lights. Then, in 1945, he had recovered enough to begin work on the sets and costumes for Stravinsky's The Firebird. The curtain for the ballet lofts a bare-breasted Bella in the embrace of a giant bird, her head upside down and holding a bouquet. It was probably his greatest theatrical production, disturbing, profound and an ultimate memorial from the bereaved painter.