The Story of Chagall, as Told by His Granddaughters

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times  Bella Meyer, left, and Meret Meyer, in front of a painting by their grandfather, the artist Marc Chagall, that is part of a new exhibition of his work at the Jewish Museum. The painting is called “The Flayed Ox.”

Strolling through a museum, two sisters stopped at a painting, a fantasy scene of faces and rooftops and a huge ox hanging upside down. They remembered it from childhood â€" it had hung in their parents’ living room, not because their parents were wealthy art patrons with an impressive collection, but because the painting had been made by their grandfather, the artist Marc Chagall.

“I was always mystified by it,” one sister, Bella Meyer, said.

But her grandfather was not one to explain what he had in mind when he roughed out the canvas shortly after World War II, and when it occupied its place on the living room wall in the 1950s and ’60s, she dared not ask. “He would say to other people, ‘What do you feel? Go into your heart,’” she recalled.

Chagall, the pioneer of modernism, is the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum on the Upper East Side called “Chagall: Love, War and Exile” that concentrates on the anguished works of his middle and later years.

In 31 paintings and 22 other works, along with letters, poems and telegrams in display cases, it tells the story that Bella Meyer and her twin sister, Meret, heard as children in France: how their grandparents finally fled Vichy France in 1941; how their mother, Ida, rolled up Chagall’s paintings and sent them off to the United States; how the precious shipment arrived undamaged; how Chagall reworked a few of them even as he began new ones.

Chagall, born in what is now Belarus in 1887, lived, uncomfortably, in Manhattan; a guide to the show says he felt disconnected from Russia and Paris. The Chagall biographer Julia Wullschlager wrote that he would “wander the back streets of Lower Manhattan to buy Jewish bread and gefilte fish and to converse in Yiddish with the small Jewish shopkeepers.”

Eventually, Chagall moved to upstate New York, and in 1948, he moved back to France.

That is the history that the world knows. His granddaughters, who are 58, have the history that they know.

Bella Meyer, a floral designer who lives in New York, said her earliest memory of Chagall was “his taking our fingers as if to understand who we were.”

“He was a very tactile person, someone who had a great need to understand the size of any mass,” she said. “He would touch us, take our cheeks. I have this memory of being touched as if it were a miracle. He looked at us as if we were a miracle, and I was thinking, ‘Hey, I’m just a little nothing. A nebbish.’ Even before I knew how to talk.’”

Meret Meyer, who lives in France and Switzerland, said that she marveled at “how he always stayed the same,” no matter whom he encountered.

“He was with de Gaulle and Malraux,” she said, “and I remember thinking it was incredible that he stays very natural when he is with these great people. I only realized it was an event because we had special dresses.” (In the 1960s, President Charles de Gaulle named the writer Andre Malraux minister for cultural affairs.)

They knew that he had been commissioned to do murals for the Metropolitan Opera House in 1966 and for a Met production of Mozart’s “Zauberflote” the following year. “We heard about it afterwards,” Meret Meyer said. (Her sister said they had been upset when the Met offered the murals as collateral for a loan in 2009. “It’s sad,” Bella Meyer said, calling the move a “gambling trick.” But she added, “It’s a very smart move.” Separately, the Met sold part of the “Zauberflote” set several years ago, but part remains in storage.)

Bella Meyer said she considered her grandfather’s paintings “friends” when she was a child. “I would go into the paintings and imagine the world in there,” she said.

But sometimes, she could not do that with the painting that had been in the living room, “The Flayed Ox.”

“I couldn’t understand this brutal statement,” she said, “and yet I was drawn to it, the strength of it.” (A book prepared for the exhibition by Susan Tumarkin Goodman, the Jewish Museum’s senior curator emeritus, says that World War II brought out memories of Chagall’s own childhood and visits to his grandfather, a ritual slaughterer.)

“He would always ask us if we loved him,” Bella Meyer said. “We would say, ‘Mais oui, grandpapa.’ He would ask if we loved his paintings. ‘Mais oui, grandpapa.’ He would ask if we found our ideal.”

Standing in the museum, she was asked if she had found her ideal.

“It’s hard to know,” she said. “The first time I was really in love, he came to me with the biggest smile and said, ‘I know now you understand my paintings.’”