Painting in Paris during modernism’s heyday, Marc Chagall used the stylistic innovations of Cubism, Surrealism and Fauvism to create soulful pictures. Snowscapes of fiddlers set in his native shtetl, romantic scenes of lovers nestled in bouquets of flowers and symbolist canvases of goats, fish and roosters floating through ultramarine nightscapes are some of the iconic images Chagall created in France between the wars.

But the painter’s romantic worldview would be challenged by the rise of fascism in Europe. An artist whose subject matter had always been the poetry of the human soul, Chagall was forced to come to terms with the horrors of the holocaust after a narrow escape to New York. Chagall: Love, War and Exile, now on view at the Jewish Museum, examines this tension, highlighting artworks made before, during and after World War II.

The exhibition galleries here are organized thematically. The first room of the show is dense with images of Eastern European Jewish folk traditions, nostalgic works painted in Paris but based on memories of his hometown Vitebsk in Belarus. In “Time Is a River Without Banks,” 1930-39, a winged fish holding a fiddle and the family’s grandfather clock float above Vitebsk’s River Dvina. Except for the prismatic fish and brown clock, the landscape in this painting is permeated with an inky, twilight blue. Chagall’s father worked in a herring warehouse in Belarus. Susan Tumarkin Goodman, senior curator at the Jewish Museum, suggests flying fish, a recurring symbol in Chagall’s work, may be a reference to the artist’s father.

Thanks in large part to Emergency Rescue Committee director Varian Fry, who helped a number of Jewish artists and intellectuals escape France, Chagall arrived in the United States in 1941. Though settled in New York, Chagall was well aware of the atrocities occurring in Europe. Vitebsk was occupied by the Germans for much of the war and most of its Jewish inhabitants were massacred.

During his exile in New York Chagall repeatedly depicted Jesus Christ on the cross and a room of the exhibition is dedicated to these crucifixion scenes. Kenneth E. Silver, writing in the exhibition catalog, says once the painter “made the essential connection” between “the death on the cross of Jesus and the contemporary plight of the Jews” a “kind of visual frenzy of suffering was unleashed in Chagall’s art.”

“Between Darkness and Light,” 1938-43, features Chagall at his easel outside on the snowy streets of Vitebsk. But now his hometown is no longer depicted wistfully; the shtetl streets are empty and the black night sky is stark against the white snow. In this canvas Chagall’s face merges with his wife’s disembodied profile, the couple waiting together for the night to end, steeped in darkness.

In Chagall: Love, War and Exile we watch as one of modernism’s most soulful painters, an artist dismissed by some as a sentimentalist, struggles to maintain his faith in the goodness of man. Chagall dabbled in poetry and some of his verses have been silkscreened on exhibition walls. In one poem the painter asks:

Should I paint the earth, the sky, my heart?

The cities burning, my brothers fleeing?

My eyes in tears.

Where should I run and fly, to whom?

Only that land is mine

That lies in my soul.

Chagall: Love, War and Exile, on view through February 2, 2014 at The Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, New York, NY, 212-423-3200,www.thejewishmuseum.org

More information about Xico Greenwald’s work can be found at xicogreenwald.com