Marc Chagall 9781780424743, 1780424744

Table of contents :
Content: I The Land of my Heart ...
II The Early Years
III Graphic Works
Chronology of the Life and Work of Marc Chagall
Index of Works Reproduced
Notes.

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Marc

CHAGALL

Marc Chagall

Text: Mikhail Guerman Sylvie Forestier Layout: Stephanie Angoh

ISBN : 978-1-78042-474-3

© Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA © Sirrocco, London (English version) © Chagall Estate/ Artists Rights Society, New York

All rights reserved. No part of this may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Contents 7

The Land of my Heart

27

The Early Years

135 Graphic Works 156 Chronology 158 Index of Works Reproduced 160 Notes

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I

The Land of my Heart…

T

Page 6: My Fiancée in Black Gloves, 1909. Oil on canvas, 88 x 65 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basle.

hrough one of those curious reversals of fate, one more exile has regained his native land. Since the exhibition of his work at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 1987 and which gave rise to an extraordinary popular fervour, Marc Chagall has experienced a second birth. Here we have a painter, perhaps the most unusual painter of the twentieth century, who at last, attained the object of his inner quest: the love of his Russia. Thus, the hope expressed in the last lines of My Life, the autobiographical narrative which the painter broke off in 1922 when he left for the West – “and perhaps Europe will love me and, along with her, my Russia” – has been fulfilled. A confirmation of this is provided today by the retrospective tendency in his homeland which, beyond the all-in-all natural re-absorption of the artist into the national culture, also testifies to a genuine interest, an attempt at analysis, an original viewpoint which enriches our study of Chagall. Contrary to what one might think, this study is still dogged by uncertainties in terms of historical fact. As early as 1961 in what is still the main work of reference1, Franz Meyer emphasised the point that even the establishment of, for example, a chronology of the artist’s works, is problematic. In fact, Chagall refused to date his paintings or dated them a posteriori. A good number of his paintings are therefore dated only approximately and to this, we must add the problems caused to Western analysts by the absence of comparative sources and, very often, by a poor knowledge of the Russian language. Therefore, we can only welcome such recent works as that of Jean-Claude Marcadé2 who, following the pioneers Camilla Gray3 and Valentina Vassutinsky-Marcadé4, has underlined the importance of the original source – Russian culture – for Chagall’s work. One must rejoice even more in the publications of contemporary art historians such as Alexander Kamensky5 and Mikhail Guerman with whom we now have the honour and pleasure of collaborating. Yet, Marc Chagall has inspired a prolific amount of literature. The great names of our time have written about his work: from the first serious essay by Efros and Tugendhold, The Art of Marc Chagall6, published in Moscow in 1918 when Chagall was only 31, to Susan Compton’s erudite and scrupulous catalogue, Chagall7, which appeared in 1985, the year of the artist’s death. On the occasion of the exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, there has been no lack of critical studies, but all this does not make easy our perception of Chagall’s art. The interpretation of his works – now linking him with the Ecole de Paris, now with the Expressionist movement, now with Surrealism – seems to be full of contradictions. Does Chagall totally defy historical or aesthetic analysis? In the absence of reliable documents – some of which were clearly lost as a result of his travels, there is a danger that any analysis may become sterile. This peculiarity by 7

which the painter’s art seems to resist any attempt at theorization or even categorization is moreover reinforced by a complementary observation. The greatest inspiration, the most perceptive intuitions are nourished by the words of poets or philosophers. Words such as those of Cendrars, Apollinaire, Aragon, Malraux, Maritain or Bachelard… Words which clearly indicate the difficulties inherent in all attempts at critical discourse, as Aragon himself underlined in 1945: “Each means of expression has its limits, its virtues, its inadequacies. Nothing is more arbitrary than to try to substitute the written word for drawing, for painting. That is called Art Criticism, and I cannot in good conscience be guilty of that.8” Words which reveal the fundamentally poetic nature of Chagall’s art itself. Even if the arbitrariness of critical discourse appears to be even more pronounced in the case of Chagall, should we renounce any attempt at clarifying, if not the mystery of his work, then at least his plastic experience and pictorial practice? Should we limit ourselves to a mere lyrical effusion of words with regard to one of the most inventive individuals of our time? Should we abandon research of his aesthetical order, or on the contrary persist in believing that his aesthetic lies in the intimate and multiform life of ideas, in their free and at times contradictory exchange? If this last is the necessary prerequisite of all advance in thought, then the critical discourse on Chagall can be enriched by new knowledge contributed by the works in Russian collections which have up to now remained unpublished, by archives which have been brought to light and by the testimony of contemporary historians. The comparison gives us a deeper comprehension of this wild art that exhausts any attempt to tame it despite efforts to conceptualize it. About 150 paintings and graphic pieces by Chagall are analysed here by the sensitive pen of the author. They were all produced between 1906–1907 – Woman with a Basket – and 1922, the year in which Chagall left Russia for good, with the exception of several later works, Nude Astride a Cockerel (1925), Time is a River without Banks (1930–1939) and Wall-clock with a Blue Wing (1949). The corpus of works presented provides a chronological account of the early period of creativity. The author’s analysis stresses with unquestionable relevance the Russian cultural sources on which Chagall’s art fed. It reveals the memory mechanism which lies at the heart of the painter’s practice and outlines a major concept. It is tempting to say a major “tempo”, that of time-movement perceptible in the plastic structure of Chagall’s oeuvre. Thus we can much better understand the vivid flourishing of the artist’s work with its cyclical, apparently repetitive (but why?) character, which might be defined as organic and which calls to mind the ontological meaning of creation itself as set out in the writings of Berdiayev. This primordial outpouring of creativity which brought the admiration of Cendrars and Apollinaire, this imperious pictorial paganism which dictates its own law to the artist, sets forth an aesthetic and an ethic of predestination which, for our part, we would like to clarify. It is in the immediacy of Chagall’s pictorial practice, in the immediacy of each creative decision that his own identity lies, that he himself is to be found. This selfrevelation is related to us by Chagall himself. The autobiographical My Life, written in Russian, first appeared in 1931 in Paris, in a French translation by Bella Chagall. Providing us with extremely precious evidence of a whole part of the artist’s life, this text – tender, alert and droll – reveals behind its anecdotal nature the fundamental themes of his work and above all, its problematic character. The tale as a whole is not moreover without some evocations of the artists’ biographies studied by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz9 who set out a typology. From the first lines one’s attention is attracted by a singular phrase: “That which first leaped to my eyes was an angel!” Thus, the first hours of Chagall’s life were registered here specifically in visual terms. The tale begins in the tone of a parable and his life-story could not belong to anyone but a painter. Chagall, who recalls the difficulties of his birth, writes: “But above all I was born dead. I did not want to live. Imagine a white bubble which does not want to live. As if it were stuffed with paintings by Chagall.10” Thus, did living there perhaps meant to liberate that which lay 8

Bella with a White Collar, 1917. Oil on canvas, 149 x 72 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

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Page 10: Birth of a Child, 1911. Oil on canvas, 65 x 89.5 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

inside him – painting? The theme of vocation contained within this premonitory dream, the obvious sign of a unique predestination, seems to us to be even more significant in that it determines the events in the artist’s life and gives meaning to his destiny. Marc Chagall was born into a strict Jewish family for whom the ban on representations of the human figure had the weight of dogma. If one is unaware of the nature of traditional Jewish education, one can hardly imagine the transgressive force, the fever of being which propelled the young Chagall when he flung himself on the journal Niva (Field) to copy from it a portrait of the composer Rubinstein. This education was based on the historic law of Divine Election and covered the religious side of life only. The transmission to the very core of the Jewish hearth was essentially effected through oral means. Each prayer, each recitation from the Torah or the Talmud imposed on the believer was in a sing-song voice; reading lessons were held out loud; everyday life was given rhythm by the repetitive times of the ritual practice of songs and on the sabbath day, solemn benedictions. Each Jewish house is a place made holy by the liturgy of the word. The Chagall family belonged to the Hassidic tradition. We should emphasize here that this form of piety – hassid means devout – gives preference to direct contact between the individual and God. The dialogue which is thus set up between the faithful and Yahweh exists without the mediation of rabbinical pomp and display. It is born directly from everyday ritual and is expressed in the exercise of personal liberty. Hassidism lies outside the scholarly talmudic culture, the institutional commentary of the synagogue. It was historically found in rural Russian and Polish communities, communities based on the original fundamental nucleus of Jewish society which is, of course, the family. Chagall’s father, Zakhar, was a pickler at a herring merchant’s. Sensitive, secretive, taciturn, the figure of Zakhar seems to have had the tragic dimension inherent in the destiny of the Jewish people. “Everything in my father seemed to me to be enigma and sadness. An inaccessible image”, Chagall wrote in My Life. On the other hand, his mother, Feyga-Ita, the eldest daughter of a butcher from Liozno, radiated vital energy. The psychological antithesis of their characters can be seen in Chagall’s very first sketches and in his series of etchings produced for Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1923 which were intended to illustrate My Life. This antithesis, so strongly felt by Chagall, embodies the age-old experience of the whole of Jewish existence: his father and mother in the artist’s paintings, in the very heart of the plastic space of the picture or drawing bring into play not only the specific reality of a memory but also the two contradictory aspects which form Jewish genius and its history – resignation to fate in the acceptance of the will of God and creative energy bearing hope, in the unshakeable sense of Divine Election. Marc had one brother and seven sisters: David, of whom he produced some moving portraits but who died in the flower of youth; Anna (Aniuta), Zina, the twins Lisa and Mania, Rosa, Marussia and Rachel, who also died young. If family life was difficult, it was not miserable. It was part of the life of the stedtl, that specificially Jewish cultural reality connected to the social structure of the ghetto. In Vitebsk, this reality fitted into the structure of rural Russian life. In the late nineteenth century Vitebsk was still a small town in Byelorussia situated at the confluence of two waterways, the Dvina and the Vitba. Its economy was expanding greatly but despite the arrival of the railway, the station, small industries and the river port, the town still retained the characteristics of a large rural village. While the numerous churches and the Orthodox cathedral gave it a more urban appearance, most of the houses were still of wood and the streets, frozen in winter, running with water in spring, were not yet paved. Each house, evidence of an economic unity founded on a traditional domestic way of life, had its little garden and poultry-yard. With their wooden fences and multi-coloured decoration, the houses of Vitebsk live on eternally in Chagall’s pictures. The Russian Orthodox and Jewish communities rubbed along side by side without ever coming into conflict. The divisions between the two were more on the social than on the 11

confessional plane. There was a Jewish middle class made up of rich merchants for whom the process of integration was clearly effected through education. Chagall himself went to the parish school even though the institution did not accept Jewish children. It was from this childhood experience that the pictorial schemes of Chagall’s plastic vocabulary originate. But the fragments of memory, which we easily identify in concrete objects even in the very first works – the room, the clock, the lamp, the samovar, the Sabbath table, the village street, the house of his birth and its roof, Vitebsk recognizable through the domes of its cathedral – did not crystallize into clearly defined images until after the passage of many years. It was only in obeying his calling (“Mummy… I would like to be a painter…11”), that is to say in tearing himself away from his family and social milieu, that Chagall could evolve his own pictorial language. A memory metamorphosed into an image will break with all everyday realism and express another reality which lies at the basis of its outward forms. Several relevant details about the artist’s life are needed here. Chagall succeeded in persuading his mother to enrol him in the school of drawing and painting of the artist Pen. But the methods of training and the laborious copying exercises soon ceased to satisfy the young Chagall. That which he was still seeking confusedly, that which he barely touched upon in his first daring colouristic experiments, had nothing in common with the academic tradition to which Pen adhered. The painting which Chagall was carrying within himself was poles apart from the representative realism which Pen inherited from The Wanderers. Rebelling against all teaching, from 1907 Chagall began to show a precocious capacity for invention – did he not use the colour violet in a way which defied all known laws? – the autodidactic quality which is the mark of true creative spirits. The painter’s destiny worked itself out in the image of some hero of the great fundamental myths which make up the collective subconscious. It was a destiny shaped through trials, of which the most decisive was tearing himself away from the place of his birth. In 1907, accompanied by his friend Viktor Mekler, Chagall left Vitebsk – one of the main symbolic images in his later work – for St. Petersburg. His departure for St. Petersburg gives rise to several questions. Chagall could in fact have wished to pursue his artistic quest, which was only just beginning, in Moscow. The choice of St. Petersburg is of particular significance. Chagall was conforming above all – without being aware of it – to a tradition stemming from the Renaissance, a tradition which makes travel one of the principal means of any apprenticeship. Whilst painting is also a craft – despite the romantic revolts, the status of the artist at the dawn of the twentieth century was still not that far from the craftsman’s status it had in the fifteenth century – the social recognition of this status was inevitably dependent on academic training. St. Petersburg, among other things, was the intellectual and artistic centre of imperial Russia. Much more than continental Moscow, it was a city whose own history was always characterized by an openness towards Western Europe. Through its architecture, its urbanity, its schools and salons, it dispensed a formal and spiritual nourishment which was to enrich the young provincial. Chagall’s keen gaze sought the least reflections of the transparent light of the North on the surface of the city’s canals. He came to seek St. Petersburg’s excellence. His failure in the entrance examination for the Stieglitz School did not stop him from later joining that founded by the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and directed by Nicholas Roerich. Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947) had taken part in the production of the journal Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), founded in 1898 by Alexander Benois and run until 1904 by Serge Diaghilev. The journal and the artists grouped around it played a decisive role in the general aesthetic debate with which Russia was preoccupied during the first decade of the twentieth century. Its emblem, a northern eagle drawn by Bakst, formally synthesized the objectives they pursued: to create a new art, original because it drew on Russian heritage, but open to the influence of the West, thus capable of bringing about, in a country which had never known such a thing in its history, a veritable Renaissance. The World of Art 12

The Wedding, 1918. Oil on canvas, 100 x 119 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

preached the doctrine of art for art’s sake. In a certain measure, the inheritor of the theories of Ruskin, which the journal made known to the Russian public, absorbed Symbolism, and the result was indisputably rich. In 1908, Roerich was a famous artist and his work multifarious. His far from negligible role in the renewal of the decorative and applied arts as preached by the World of Art should not let us forget his work as the designer of numerous sets for theatre and ballet productions. A convinced Slavophile, much like Kandinsky, who undertook extremely detailed ethnographic research, he was in his very essence opposed to The World of Art group, who looked to the West. The critical debate between the Westernists and the Slavophiles was one of the major controversies which reverberated through the intellectual history of Russia. In 1909, the controversy was increased twofold through the permanent and symbolic rivalry between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Another journal founded by a Muscovite merchant, Nikolai Riabushinsky, came to take the place of The World of Art, the main participants having left Russia for Western Europe. Entitled Zolotoye Runo or The Golden Fleece (a militant journal), it asserted freedom of expression in the name of one of the basic ancient myths of ancestral Russia, the incarnation of that fabulous Scythia which Blok extolled in his famous poem. Like The World of Art, The Golden Fleece, which ceased to appear in 1909, contributed to the artistic life of the period in question. It made known to the wider public individuals as diverse as Benois, Bakst (meeting with whom played an important 13

role in Chagall’s life), Roerich, Golovin, Dobuzhinsky, Larionov, Goncharova… Numerous French figures also became involved. Charles Morice published a series of articles concerning the new tendencies in French art; Maurice Denis wrote a study on Gauguin and Van Gogh; Matisse himself, who found his main collectors in the Russians Shchukin and Morozov, analysed his conception of arts in the essay A Painter’s Notes12. The repercussions of these articles, backed up by a series of exhibitions organized by the journal in 1908, 1909 and 1910, were considerable. Unlike The World of Art, whose aesthetic model was eighteenth-century France (even if its general tendency could actually 14

Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1911. Oil on canvas, 128 x 107 cm. Royal Collection, The Hague.

be linked with the international Art Nouveau), the Golden Fleece called on Russian artists to create works contemporary in spirit and as a consequence, contributed to the reflection on the idea of modernity which we know was decisive for the evolution of art. There is no doubt that in St. Petersburg Chagall became aware of the reverberations of the many controversies which were stirring in the realm of painting. However, the teaching of Roerich, little different from that offered by Pen, disappointed him, and the sturdy exercise of copying seemed to him to be a waste of time. “Two years lost in this school”, he wrote with bitterness. Two years which allowed him, however, to meet his first patron and collector, the lawyer Goldberg, whose Drawing Room and Study (1908) he depicted, and above all his future protector, the influential deputy in the Duma, Maxim Vinaver. Chagall frequented the intellectual Jewish circles which revolved around Vinaver and which aimed to revive, with the writer Pozner, the critic Sirkin, and Leopold Sev, Vinaver’s brother-in-law, the Jewish journal Voskhod (Renewal), published in Russian. The participation of the Jewish intelligentsia in the major artistic debate of the time is incontestable. The growing awareness of a specific Jewish cultural identity did not exclude the desire to give it a new dimension of national and international universality. Voskhod was the instrument of this action. Vinaver and Sev were to open the doors of the famous Zvantseva school for Chagall. This private school had been founded by a rich woman, herself a painter, Yelizaveta Nikolayevna Zvantseva, who after a stay in Paris, decided to develop a new kind of teaching capable of giving young Russian artists the technical means to develop a totally contemporary form of expression, which they lacked. In St. Petersburg, Zvantseva summoned those who were considered to be the greatest artists of the time, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and, above all, Léon (Lev) Bakst. Bakst had acquired international renown in particular through his collaboration with Diaghilev. An elegant portraitist, he also worked in the sphere of the decorative arts, illustrated books, and above all created brilliant costume and set designs for the theatre and the ballet. Thus he worked for Diaghilev and his stars, Fokine, Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky. His reputation was outstanding. Chagall knew this and was profoundly impressed by it, even though Bakst, a European was, like him, Chagall, a Jew. For Chagall, to enter the Zvantseva school, to approach Bakst, was a mark of privilege. Here, close to one of his own, he prepared himself to find that other reality which he was pursuing, which he carried within him, and which he sought to objectivize solely by means of painting. In the freedom of the teaching dispensed by Bakst, bit by bit Chagall elaborated his language, achieved the spatial mastery of colour, and gradually found his style. He was not influenced by Bakst’s Symbolist aesthetic nor his decorative mannerism. On the other hand, he rapidly mastered one of the painter’s demands which was “the art of juxtaposing contrasting colours whilst balancing their reciprocal influence…13” This can be seen in The Small Parlour and dated 1908, executed at the beginning of his period of study with Bakst. On a freely painted delicate rose-coloured background, the arabesques of objects – chairs, table, and flower vase – are drawn in brown. The light forms seem to dance within an airy space which is devoid of any illusion of perspective. Depth, without being described, is suggested by the use of a light green which hollows out the ground. In the foreground, the double curvature of the back of a chair and the broken angle of a table seem to set the whole space in motion in the manner of certain pastels by Degas. In this work, Chagall has also revealed his colouristic skill. The virtuoso audacity of the composition manifests an ease which holds undivided sway in this picture executed at Liozno during a visit to the artist’s grandfather. In fact, Chagall often visited his relatives; he painted his brother and sisters, his parents, and everyday scenes in the desire to sharpen his vision, to make it more refined. He painted Vitebsk, its streets and its wooden houses; Vitebsk, his childhood town and later an emblematic symbol of the land of his birth. In the autumn of 1909 through Thea Brachman, a friend who had once posed for him, Chagall met his future wife, Bella Rosenfeld. An unforgettable meeting related by both in 15

their memoirs: “Suddenly I realized that it was not with Thea that I should be but with her! Her silence is mine. Her eyes, mine; it was as if she had known me for a long time, as if she knew my whole childhood, my present, my future; as if she were watching over me, looking closer into me, although I saw her for the first time. I felt that this was my wife14”, relates Chagall in My Life. And in Lumières allumées Bella replies: “I dare not lift my eyes and meet the boy’s look. His eyes are now greyish green, sky and water. Is it in these eyes or in a river that I am swimming…15” My Fiancée in Black Gloves (1909) is evidence of the confusion they felt. The work was the first in a long series of portraits of Bella and belongs with his family portraits of David, Mania, and Aniuta, but yet it is distinguished from them by its air of grave solemnity. Bella, in a white dress decorated with a collar of pleated lace, stands in the centre of the picture. Her head, slightly turned to one side, is topped with a beret from beneath which her brown hair shows. The spatial composition and the pose itself endow the figure with a certain monumentality, as seen in portraits painted in the classical tradition. But the chromatic contrast between the dazzling white of the dress and the deep black of the gloves gives a strange charm to this female figure, as mysterious as an apparition. The simultaneous opposition of colours marks the appearance of a new conception which broke the laws of genre and would eventually be brought to fulfilment. My Fiancée in Black Gloves, and later Bella with a White Collar (1917), are true portraits in their acute observation of the physical and psychological verity of the sitter. But the sitter is not the prisoner of her own individuality. The image of the beloved woman, the image of the love which she arouses, Bella takes on the universal dimension of a type. The picture is in this sense an icon. Its function is not representative but demonstrative. It has a hidden meaning. From 1909, Chagall was concerned with the major question of creativity – that of the very status of painting – which practice forced upon him. Was painting only the illusionistic replication of the material world? Should it not, on the contrary, be the privileged mode of exploring beyond the appearances which make up perceptible reality? Should it not be, like poetry, one of the means of revealing being? An ancient philosophical debate which goes back to Plato, this line of questioning runs through the whole history of painting. In Russia, it took on a fundamental dimension which was to characterize all the experiments of the Russian avant-garde from Goncharova to Malevich. But Chagall consistently rebelled against all attempts to theorize art. Did he meet, for example, at Bakst’s, Larionov and Goncharova, already embarked in 1909 and 1910 on the Futurist adventure? Not one precise document to this day confirms this. The young painter, despite his probable awareness of the breadth and effervescent vitality of the young Russian artistic movement, worked alone. The themes of his personal symbolism were born only of his internal experience, of the creative reverie of images which ally painting to poetry. Two pictures are the specific expression of this: The Dead Man (1908) and Birth (1910). The author’s analysis of the latter strongly underlines the sacramental character which transforms an ordinary scene into a liturgical celebration, a characteristic which was already visible in The Dead Man. A specific memory related by Chagall in My Life was the basis for this picture: “One morning, well before dawn, cries suddenly rose up in the street beneath the window. By the feeble glimmer of the nightlight I was able to distinguish a woman running alone through the deserted streets.” She was afraid to stay alone with her husband. Disturbed people ran up from all sides. The whole world was wailing, crying. “But those who were more steady, used to everything, drew the woman aside, quietly lit the candles and surrounded by silence began to pray out loud over the head of the dead man. The light of the yellow candles, the colour of the face – only just dead, the assurance of the movements of the old ones, their impassive eyes persuaded me and those around that everything was over… The dead man, solemnly sad, was already lying on the 16

To Russia, Asses and Others, 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 156 x 122 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.

ground, the face lit by six candles.16” Other images mix with this memory: that of the eccentric grandfather whom he often found perched on the roof of the house; that of his violinist uncle. But if memory furnished the elements of the picture, the picture is not reduced to its simple and 17

naturalistic transcription. Each element is revealed as a constituent part of the whole. In the centre is the village street with here and there little houses of wood crowned with thatched roofs. On the left side of the street, the dead man lies on the ground surrounded by the six candles. To the right a woman, arms lifted to the sky, is running, while disappearing between the houses is a man of whom we can see only his legs. In the middle of the street, a sweeper, indifferent to the scene, carries on with his work. Chagall indisputably took the main part of the scene from his own recollections, but the comparison of the narrative with the picture already indicates some differences. Whilst the figure of the woman conforms to the tale, there is no trace there of the sweeper and of the other person whose legs we see, impossible to identify, a person without a face like death itself. The realistic details – the lighted candles, the corpse lying on the ground – do indeed correspond to the Jewish funeral ritual. But the exhibition of the body in the middle of the village is invented. The violinist, in turn, seems to be a sort of collage in a single figure of memories of his grandfather on the roof and his musician uncle. The composition is based on a cross formation and relies upon the positioning of the figures. The violinist in the upper part forms a vertical which is opposed with the dead body lying horizontally in the lower part. The woman in distress turns her back on the sweeper. Through the window of the house to the left a light is shining. That of the house to the right is in darkness. The street itself, a dark triangle, is the antithesis of the sky, a light triangle. The choice of colours also corresponds to the formal composition. The contrast of cold and warm values helps to accentuate the strangeness of the scene whilst suggesting its meaning. The left is effectively dominated by calm forms and cold colours. In their immobile poses the violinist and the dead man seem to belong to the eternal order of nature. To the right, the colliding forms, the figures in movement and the freer colours (the green of the woman’s bodice, the white other skirt, the pink of the houses) seem in turn to indicate the universe of human passions. A new allegorical symbol of destiny, the sweeper is on the edge of these two worlds; as for the unknown figure who turns his back on this scene and seems to flee, could he not be the incarnation of Chagall himself? The painting would thus represent the drama of the choice which leads the artist, for the sake of his vocation, to break with the natural order of his family and social milieu. The historical circumstances surrounding Chagall’s departure for Paris are now well known. The lawyer Vinaver, his protector and first patron, gave him a grant in exchange for a canvas, The Wedding (1910), and a drawing. The grant, 125 francs, had to enable the young man to stay abroad for four years. A man who espoused a humanist culture, 18

The Cattle Dealer, 1912. Oil on canvas, 96 x 200 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basle.

Vinaver hoped that Chagall would leave for Rome, but he opted instead for Paris. The artistic radiance of the French capital was indisputable, and Chagall was not mistaken: Paris was to be his “second Vitebsk”. At first isolated in the little room on the Impasse du Maine, at La Ruche Chagall soon found numerous compatriots also attracted by the prestige of Paris: Lipchitz, Zadkine, Archipenko and Soutine, who were to maintain the smell of his native land around the young painter. From his very arrival Chagall wanted to “discover everything”. And to his dazzled eyes painting did indeed reveal itself. First of all, painting in the museums. In the Louvre he discovered Chardin, Fouquet, Rembrandt: “It was as if the gods were standing before me.17” Painting of which he had dreamed in Vitebsk or St. Petersburg, the painting of eternity, where the eternity of painting could be read. Then the art which was closer to Chagall, that of Courbet, Manet, Monet, the first revolutionaries in the way of looking. A telling comparison: “The best Russian realist insults the realism of Courbet. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if compared to Monet or Pissarro.18” The whole historical dimension, the whole aesthetic and cultural dimension of the history of painting was unveiled before Chagall. This decisive apprenticeship in a way of looking was reinforced in some of the studio exercises at La Grande Chaumiere and La Palette, run by Le Fauconnier (whose wife was Russian). But the true formal nourishment for Chagall was to be, according to his own statements, Paris itself; Paris and that extraordinary “Light-Liberty” through which he fulfilled himself as a painter. From this first Parisian period great masterpieces blossomed forth: To Russia, Asses and Others (1911–1912), I and the Village (1911), The Holy Carter (1911–1912), Hommage à Apollinaire (1911–1912), and Self-portrait with Seven Fingers (1911). The frenzy of painting which animated Chagall justifies the terms which, later, the poet André Breton employed to describe it in Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme (1941): “The total lyrical explosion dates from 1911. It is from this moment that metaphor, with him alone, marks its triumphant entry into modern painting.19” This pictorial fulguration which found the path of self-expression was indeed a total lyrical explosion. How could one not be surprised by the miracle of Chagall’s painting between 1911 and 1914? How could one not marvel at the obstinate coherence of a creator who mastered the lessons of Fauvism and Cubism only in order to liberate himself from them even more? Chagall already knew intuitively that colour in its extremes is the bearer of physically tangible values. He had to raise its radiance to the limit, to use its rare sonority. The painter was indebted to the Fauvists, Van Gogh, Gauguin and Matisse, whose works he saw at Bernheim’s, for his encounter with absolute colour. To Cézanne and the Cubists he owed the geometric framework of his paintings between 1911 and 1914 and the elements of his plastic grammar. But his individuality resisted all theoretic limits. “Let them eat their square pears on their triangular tables!20” he cried vehemently, speaking of the Cubists. A true creator, Chagall borrowed from Cubism only that which served his personal vision. Painting, for this artistic rebel, was above all the flight of the imagination. The thematic repertory of the works executed between 1911 and 1914 is significant in this regard. Russian subjects mix with those of the ghetto, family figures with those of the village community: The Wedding (1910), Sabbath (1910), Grandfather (1910), Around the Lamp (1910), Birth of a Child (1911), a theme already treated in 1910, The Village Under the Moon (1911), Dedicated to my Fiancée (1911), Praying Jew (1912–1913), The Cattle Dealer (1912), Maternity (or the Pregnant Woman; 1913), To Russia, Asses and Others (1911–1912), Father (1914) – they all speak of his sadness, of a nostalgia for the land of his birth. These paintings profess themselves totally in the creative tension born of a sense of something lacking, of a paradise lost. They are thus the obstinate attempt to reconstruct a world which the artist snatches away from oblivion, a world freed from the laws of gravity… 19

20

Page 20: Peace to Cottages, War on Palaces, 1918–1919. Pencil and watercolour on paper, 33.7 x 23.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

The process of embodying memory in plastic form can be seen in a picture such as The Cattle Dealer, of which Chagall produced two versions (1912 and 1923). The scene in fact evokes his trips to the cattle market in a horse-drawn cart with his uncle Neuch. But the composition, the scale of the figures and the colour used to construct form give this everyday scene of peasant life a universal significance. Is it not in fact the powerful exaltation of the irresistible force of life, always renewing itself, which seems to be evoked here? The clear symbol of the foal seen in the belly of the mare who pulls the cart is explicit in this regard. The unreal red colour of the animal accentuates the symbolic effect. All the figures, and in particular the peasant woman who carries a young calf on her shoulders, are treated monumentally. In the foreground a young man in a cap and a woman in a shawl embrace each other’s shoulders. These two figures are represented half length. They are the pivot of the composition and perhaps provide the key to reading it. Placed in the bottom right of the picture, they play a role similar to that of the donor figures to be seen in medieval painting, the role of witnesses. The scene thus acquires a radiant gravity which is not only the result of its plastic organization and our sensory perception of it. The scene requires above all a cognitive reading, turning the picture into a lesson. In magnifying all forms, animal or human, painting is the sublime metaphor of life. In its function of showing, plainly affirmed here, The Cattle Dealer is akin to the art of the icon. The influence on Chagall’s art of the icon and the lubok – the popular Russian prints sold all over the country by hawkers – has often been emphasized, sometimes exaggeratedly. But this emphasis seems to us to be justified in the analysis of the figurative code used by the artist, whom we know, moreover, was highly sensitive to the magic light of the icon. Chagall was, in fact, from 1911, in full command of a plastic language which owed nothing to western tradition. Like his compatriots Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova, he linked himself on the contrary to the Byzantine tradition, which had always given priority to meaning and not to representation. The extreme elongation of the figures, the rejection of perspective, the plasticity of the interior space, the frontality we often see in his works, the occasional use of red backgrounds as in icons from the Novgorod school, are recognizable objective elements of Chagall’s representative system. The rejection of all illusionistic realism had been confirmed very early in the painter’s history by Apollinaire’s celebrated exclamation: “surnaturel!…”; Apollinaire, the poet who, the day after their memorable meeting, dedicated his poem Rodsoge to Chagall. Certainly the Cubist syntax permitted the painter to give spatial structure to his internal experience in all its multiplicity of different levels. But the “intentionality” of the picture derives from the spiritualist, symbolic culture peculiar to Russia, a mystical land par excellence. Here we should mention the obvious similarity which exists between Chagall’s conception of the world and Russian symbolical thought as expressed in the theories of Vladimir Solovyov or reflected by the articles of Viacheslav Ivanov in the journal The Golden Fleece in 1908 and in Apollo in 1910, which Jean Laude recalls in his Naissance des abstractions21. The similarity lies in the theory of correspondences formulated in the West by Mallarmé and Rimbaud, but which in Russia took on the dimension of a true cosmological conception. The intimate link between man and the universe expresses the profound unity of all living things. This affirmation of the consubstantiality of man and the world is intuitively perceived by Chagall when he writes in My Life: “Art seems to me to be above all a state of the soul. The souls of everyone, of all bipeds at all points of the earth, are holy.22” And later, in 1958, Chagall added, in a speech at the University of Chicago: “Life is clearly a miracle. We are parts of this life and we pass, with age, from one form of life to another… A man can never technically or mechanically learn all the secrets of life. But through his soul he is connected with the world, in harmony with it, perhaps even unconsciously.23” We are not far here from the notion of Stimmung. The second aspect linking Chagall to the dominant artistic currents in contemporary 21

Russia lies in his admiration for Gauguin and his own search for a colour which would give itself up in its totality, for a colour which was pure, original, a colour which was radiant, a colour bearing energy and magic. The vitality of the Russian folk arts in the early twentieth century and the enthusiastic perception of their chromatic splendour would determine the development of the Russian avant-garde, from Larionov and Goncharova to Malevich and Kandinsky. Without referring expressly to it, Chagall was not unaware of Russian neo-primitivism: had he not exhibited, in March 1912, at the Donkey’s Tail and in 1913 at Target, two exhibitions organized by Larionov in which Malevich also took part? Malevich, who followed a parallel path to that of Chagall; Malevich, who dramatically insulted Chagall in 1919 in Vitebsk. The Revolution was to bring the painter the hope of new dignity and the possibility of his realization as an artist. The declaration of war had in effect brought him back to Vitebsk. He found his native soil, his family again, and married Bella. A daughter, Ida, was soon born. A wealth of personal happiness was added to the promise of universal happiness and the obtaining of the rights of full citizenship. Chagall believed fervently in the Revolution. He had known Anatoly Lunacharsky in Paris. The latter became Commissar for Cultural Affairs in the first Soviet government in 1917 and helped to put into effect Lenin’s vast cultural project for Russia, which was not without similarities to the ideology propagated by The Wanderers during the second half of the nineteenth century. Lunacharsky offered Chagall the post of Commissar for Fine Arts in the Vitebsk region and Chagall accepted with enthusiasm. Art as a principle of the flowering of the individual and as a means of social promotion found in Chagall its most active representative. Untiring, the painter established the basic structures for teaching – a museum, an art school, a revolutionary studio – the prerequisites for this revolution of the soul which he sought to bring about in each of his compatriots. He summoned Dobuzhinsky, his former teacher from the Zvantseva school, Pen himself, Ivan Puni and El Lissitzky. For the first anniversary of the October Revolution he made “art descend into the streets” and transformed the urban decoration of Vitebsk with a sense of the mise-en-scène which he later was to express in his works for the theatre and, above all, the ballet. Chagall’s use of symbolism, contained in a simple, strong image, is exemplified, for instance, in the famous sketch War on Palaces: a peasant in a traditional shirt raises up high a palace, recognizable from its colonnade. The effect is direct, the message immediately perceived. The language acquires the universal quality of a poster. This period, although exciting, was to be marked by the conflict with Malevich. There is little evidence to give us an account of this confrontation: Chagall spoke of it only in a roundabout way in My Life. But an examination of the aesthetic path taken by each of the two artists makes it clear that antagonism was inevitable. When, in fact, Malevich was invited by the students of the Art School in Vitebsk – Chagall states, moreover, that this was on his initiative – he was already a famous artist who had formulated the basis of his Suprematist doctrine. The beginning of the year saw the organization of the 10th AllRussia Exhibition “Non-objective Creation and Suprematism”, at which Malevich showed his White Square. The exhibition revealed the tensions existing within the Russian group of non-objective artists and, in consequence, the virulence and topicality of an aesthetic debate which involved ideological stances. Chagall’s distrust of any collective stand as far as art was concerned was stronger than ever. His conviction that painting could be nothing but a personal adventure did not weaken. For him it was evident that the artist’s mission remains subjective. The history of painting is a history of painters. Malevich violently attacked Chagall for his teaching principles and the nature of his art, which he contemptuously charged with naturalism. Malevich’s temperament, excessive and at times violent, was in sharp contrast to that of Chagall. Did Malevich also – with his Polish Catholic origins – have an instinctive distrust of the Slavic Jew? Chagall, in his turn rebelling against any theorization of art, did not understand Malevich’s 22

The Wall of Lamentations, 1932. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv.

aesthetic commitment. At the end of 1919 Chagall was forced to leave Vitebsk, and Malevich set up the group UNOVIS – Affirmation of New Art. The avant-garde thus drove Chagall away in the name of their radical ideas. The disappointment made a deep wound. Perhaps the vague feeling anchored in the heart of all Jews of being misunderstood, of being an exile in the world, had been revived. “I would not be surprised if, after such a long absence, my town effaced all traces of me and would no longer remember him who, laying down his own brush, tormented himself, suffered, and gave himself the trouble of implanting Art there, who dreamed of transforming the ordinary houses into museums and the ordinary inhabitants into creative people. And I understood then that no man is a prophet in his own country. I left for Moscow”, Chagall remarked with bitterness24. Thus we can better understand Chagall’s return towards the world of his origins. In Moscow the painter renewed contact with the coterie of Jewish intellectuals and through the theatre rediscovered Jewish culture. The meeting with Alexei Granovsky, director of the Chamber Theatre, gave him the chance of working for the stage and of experimenting in an architectural space. The decoration for the auditorium, not without humour, pays true homage to Jewish culture and spirituality. But Chagall no longer recognized his Russia, now prey to the inevitable violence of history. In 1922 he was forced into exile, as if his destiny as an artist could not fulfil itself except through the bitter experience of a man wrenched from his own country. Chagall’s life was henceforth embodied in the destiny of 23

a painter who literally lived painting, his creation perpetually renewed in the certainty of its own being. “To paint. A man has spent his life in painting. And when I say his life understand me. The rest is gesticulation. To paint is his life.25” Thus spoke Aragon the poet of Chagall the Admirable. And in fact Chagall painted until his last breath – a lifelong mute dialogue between the canvas and the painter. The poet’s words here touch on the essential matter. Despite the analyses which nowadays illuminate the painters JudaeoRussian sources, the formal relationships, inherited or borrowed but always sublime, there is always some share of mystery in Chagall’s art. The mystery perhaps lies in the very nature of his art, which uses the experience of memories. Painting truly is life, and perhaps life is painting. This is emphasized by the author whose conclusions in some ways come close to the opinions of Louis Aragon. The art of Chagall is inscribed in the flow of temporality, in the unfolding of a creative reverie demanding conscious effort for its embodiment. The visual logic which arranges the forms on the canvas henceforth obeys other laws than those which govern Euclidean space. No geometric vector defines the space and the plasticity of the latter permits the drawing to express itself in all its suppleness and its spontaneity. It is not without significance that Chagall’s painting summons musical terms from the pen of the critic or the historian. Figures and motifs are perceived as so many sonorous objects, colours as rhythms and lines as melodies, the metaphor closely fits the painting because, like the latter, it brings out the conception of time.

T

he twentieth century is drawing to a close. The time which meant so much to Marc Chagall is approaching its turning point, that moment reflected in the artist’s paintings in which clocks fly in the heavens with their troubled pendulums quivering, when Time becomes tangible, when it becomes at once a wonderful and a frightening marvel. We are beginning to sum up the century which from its very first days was so given to self-assessment. Even now we have little doubt about which names constitute its glory. And although our age will leave to the next millennium more than a few enigmas (despite the superabundance of information or perhaps precisely because of it) much has been determined with complete, or almost complete, certainty. The fine arts have not been the most important aspect of the twentieth century. We can name several dozen novels, films or musical works which have absorbed mankind’s hopes and agony, which have shaken people’s consciousness, which have gained what we might call a superaesthetic significance. There are scarcely any such works in the sphere of painting with the possible exception of the great Guernica. Perhaps in the distant future it will become clear which pictures truly reflect the dizzy heights and yawning abysses of our century. But for now, the names of only very few artists ring like an echo of the century. One of those few names is that of Chagall. He painted and drew almost from the very beginning of the century to practically its very end, marvellously combining truth to himself – his artistic character was amazingly consistent and developed at a very early stage – with truth to the swiftly and tragically changing times. Time pierced him through, depriving him of his roots, of those he loved, shaking him with its wars, with suffering, with the trials of the wide world and of little Vitebsk; everything resounded through his soul. But the “Archimedes’ point”, once found – “Blessed is he who was able to find Archimedes’ point in himself” (Tiutchev) – helped him to remain the always recognizable Chagall who believed in love and beauty, in kindness, in the all-vanquishing power of painting, in the healing strength of fantasy and happiness, who was able to see universal greatness in the most insignificant elements of life on earth. Not only did he find himself early on. Even in his later years he returned to the images and devices of the early period, and in his youthful works, we can glimpse clear 24

Page 25: Promenade, 1929. Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 39 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy Rosengart Gallery, Lucerne.

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II The Early Years

Page 26: Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1917. Oil on canvas, 88.9 x 58.4 cm. Private Collection.

hints of the Olympian heights he was to reach in his last paintings. Within his art, time freely ranges from the beginning to the end of its path, and back again, bringing maturity to his early work and a radiant naivety to his last efforts. Chagall knew the secret of Time. In his life, the pendulum of the passing decades swings now forwards, now backwards… Without these eternal returnings he would not have been himself; more than anyone else he was “born of his childhood” (Saint-Exupéry), of his little Vitebsk, which was not only his homeland, but also the habitat of his spirit from infancy to old age. Therefore, to write about Chagall’s early work essentially means to write about Chagall as a whole: his very roots were the prototype of the top of a tall tree; it is perhaps because of this that so often in his pictures, top and bottom change places and heads are shown upside down. The swift flourishing of his talent seems like a miracle in a remote little town, in a large Jewish family oppressed by poverty and by their status as outcasts, by memories of the pogroms and the expectation of more to come. He saw high art only in odd reproductions; his talent fed on imagination and acute sensitivity, on a tendency to notice details and to instinctively synthesize his observations into a fabulous but authentic whole. Marc Chagall was born dead and was well aware of it. For the artist, always striving to penetrate to the very essence of time, perpetually interchanging end and beginning, such a knowledge played a major role in determining his creative fate, his sense of the great value of life, of the essence of death, birth and existence. And he perceived the paradoxes of Time itself in his own special way. The solemn ritual nature of ceremonies, the tolerance and wisdom customary in a large family (he was the eldest of nine children) and goodness – these, no doubt, were instilled in him at home. We must also assume that his talent for loving, for seeing in love the meaning and support of life, came from his home life: for what else had the poor to rely on? The Vitebsk we see in his early works was undoubtedly the realization of his childhood impressions enriched by his own spiritual experience. From the very beginning, Chagall’s work was autobiographical; his paintings chronicle the history of his soul, the story of his comprehension of the world through its visible and at the same time only guessed form. His best works from the end of the 1900s, Kermis and The Dead Man (both 1908), retain an untroubled, child-like perception of happiness and sorrow seen through the prism of ritual myth, both loftily detached and yet lubok-like. Such things could have been painted by a brilliantly talented self-taught artist, or by a refined professional. In fact, Chagall had only a brief but varied and useful training. His first tutor was Yuri Pen (1854–1937), head of a drawing school in Vitebsk. Pen was a gifted painter of the 27

good traditional school – he had studied at the Academy of Arts under Pavel Chistiakov – who had been able to find his own free, poetical language. In his views of Vitebsk, there is something akin to the work of Chagall. Not in flights of fancy, not in acute individuality, but in an all-pervasive sadness, a taste for invention and an understanding,of the melancholy and poetry of poor Jewish backstreets and alleys. All of Chagall’s recollections are permeated with colour, interwoven with colour associations. From the window of a tram, he saw the sign of Pen’s school with white letters on a blue (!) background. This colouristic presentiment did not deceive him: Pen saw his talent even in the painstaking copies Chagall had made of illustrations from the then popular magazine Niva (Field). Seeing that drawing from plaster copies neither made Chagall happy nor was of any use to him, Pen permitted his strange student to work as he wished. Moreover, if we are to believe Chagall’s memoirs, his strange love of the colour violet so attracted Pen that the latter refused to take any payment for the lessons. In 1907, Marc Chagall decided to go to St. Petersburg. He had almost no money and to poverty, was added humiliation – he had to get a residence permit without which Jews had no right to live in the capital. He did not even consider going to the Academy of Arts and he failed the entrance examination of the Baron Stieglitz Central School of Technical Design. But the Drawing School, attached to the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, accepted him straight into the third year and even gave him a grant. There he was noticed by Nicholas Roerich himself, then the school’s director. His three years in St. Petersburg were a strange mixture of poverty, humiliation and 28

Page 28: Kermis (Village Fair), 1908. Oil on canvas, 68 x 95 cm. Collection Writ Ludington, Santa Barbara, California, USA. Page 29: Sabbath, 1910. Oil on canvas, 90 x 98 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

swift advancement, even luck. Having exhausted all that the School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts was able to give him, he went to study, with a recommendation from one of his teachers, with Léon Bakst, already a marvellous artist recognized both in Russia and in Paris. At that time, Bakst was teaching in the private art school of Yelizaveta Zvantseva near the Tauride Gardens in the very building above which rose the famous tower of the Symbolist poet Viacheslav Ivanov. There, the atmosphere was artistic and romantic; in the middle of the studio stood an easel which had once belonged to Vrubel. The teaching essentially followed the lines of The World of Art and as well as Bakst, the teachers included Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Valentin Serov. Chagall was attracted by the brilliance of their European skill and taste, but was troubled by their extreme refinement. To earn some money, he was forced to work as a sign painter and in this, he found the charm of spontaneity; he somehow managed to divine the elegant sharpness of works by contemporary French artists which he merely knew from a few reproductions. He felt a pull towards Paris but Bakst advised him against going. For three months, Chagall disappeared from the school; he returned and then went to Vitebsk. There he painted The Birth (1910), one of his first pictures permeated with the idea of the unbreakable links between the celestial and the earthly. It is difficult here to find any trace of his St. Petersburg’s impressions or of Bakst’s lessons… The picture has a biblical, almost medieval supplication, an icon-like frozen mysteriousness, a piercing concreteness which recalls the work of Van Gogh, coupled with the realities of Vitebsk’s humdrum existence. Chagall had no problem combining events, places and genres. All this so naturally 29

overflowed from one into the other in his consciousness that in the picture, it was realized in a form which was spontaneously synthesized from the very beginning. The luminous, helpless flesh is perceived as a boundless symbol of life, rising up above the enfeebled body of the mother. And burning like a gloomy flame, is the luxurious bed-curtain – goodness knows where it has come from in this poor house – like some sort of emanation from this solemn ceremony which represents the conquering of death. Let us recall once more: Chagall knew that he was born dead. Nearby, in the depths of the room, are other people, another world, poor and empty. These people, both melancholy and amusing like the majority of Chagall’s characters, see the birth as an ordinary link in the chain of life. These two worlds – the celestial, framed with a scarlet alcove-mandorla, and the earthly, in the yellow light of a paraffin lamp – are united by the ghostly face beyond the dark window which recalls both a poor passer-by and a bleak vision, a symbol of nonexistence. The heavy, powerful clusters of colour might be compared with peals of thunder: they seem to contain an echo, an overflow of primordial forces, perceived with naive, touching palpitation. With this sense of both the pain and light of life, with a confused pull towards a new, powerful art, an art devoid of excessive rationalism and refined aestheticism, he finally left for Paris. A wealthy deputy of the Duma, Maxim Vinaver. agreed to give him a grant. 30

Page 30: Self-Portrait, 1909. Oil on canvas, 57 x 48 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Page 31: The Artist’s Sister (Mania), 1909. Oil on canvas, 93 x 48 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

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He settled in La Ruche1, a remarkable building which its owner, the sculptor Dubois, had fitted up as a modest residence for artists and writers arriving in Paris. The building, situated in the Rue Danzig, was unpleasantly close to the Vaugirard abattoir, but on the other hand it was not so far from the Boulevard Montparnasse with its famous artistic cafés La Coupole, La Rotonde and Le Select, and above all, accommodation at La Ruche cost only one hundred francs a year. There many artists from Russia, such as Ossip Zadkine Alexander Archipenko and Chaim Soutine, found refuge, and other residents included Fernand Léger. Robert Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars. The confusion of the first days soon turned into enthusiasm (“The Louvre put an end to my doubts”). Chagall was greatly preoccupied with modern art. Having barely managed to break himself of his unhurried provincial contemplativeness in St. Petersburg, here in Paris he found himself caught up in a swiftflowing stream of seething, sparkling artistic life which could have overcome even a more hardened spirit. But even when he saw Cézanne, then taking his rightful place in art, the 32

Page 32: Golgotha, 1912. Oil on canvas, 174 x 191.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Page 33: I and the Village, 1911. Oil on canvas, 191.2 x 150.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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early Cubist experiments of Picasso and Braque. the Fauves, Léger’s exploratory works and all the wonderful, fervent, contradictory, elusive maelstrom of art, of varied and related artists and styles, that is generally termed the Ecole de Paris, he retained within himself his wise and steadfast “centre of gravity”, his ironic and yet tender philosophy. Nonetheless, it was natural that he immediately began to form part of this world, perhaps precisely because he was not afraid to remain himself and yet was not shy of 34

Page 34: The Fiddler, 1912–1913. Oil on canvas, 184 x 148.5 cm. Royal Collection, The Hague. Page 35: The Wedding, 1910. Oil on canvas, 98 x 188 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

learning from others. Chagall was endowed with a sort of stylistic immunity: he enriched himself without destroying anything of his own inner structure. Admiring the works of others he studied them ingenuously, ridding himself of his youthful awkwardness, yet never losing his “Archimedes’ point for a moment. At times the painter seemed to look at the world through the magic crystal – overloaded with artistic experimentation – of the École de Paris. In such cases he would embark on a subtle and serious play with the various discoveries of the turn of the century and turned his prophetic gaze like that of a biblical youth, to look at himself ironically and thoughtfully in the mirror which naturally and totally uneclectically reflected the painterly discoveries of Cézanne, the delicate inspiration of Modigliani and complex surface rhythms recalling the experiments of the early Cubists (Self-portrait at the Easel, 1914). Was this a conscious experimentation with all the lessons of others, so that by comprehending them yet remaining himself he would comprehend himself? Now of course, clearly able to see the course of Chagall’s art and his internal world, nobody would dare to ascribe such rationalist experiments to him. Here his successors must analyse that which lay within the artist himself, not imposed by any external programme or preconceived task. Chagall was one of the first artists of our century to perceive and depict what is now usually called the iconosphere as an essential part of nature, as tangible for the artist as the objective, material world. Art for Chagall was as real as the face of a man or the sky outside the window; in his works the reminiscences of paintings produced by his famous predecessors sound not as an echo but as an independent melody organically weaving itself into the material world he depicted. In the Self-portrait the attentive viewer will find more than a few traits of Marc Chagall’s eventual artistic system, which was at that very time taking shape. Here we see the volatility of figures, seemingly ready to become weightless and fly through the air, and the exultant, sluggish play of blue Chagallian hues – intense in the clothes, dissolving in the sky (is it not from here that this sense of weightlessness, of soaring, derives?) and melting in the infinitely sad and slightly playful eyes; here we see the painful 35

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Page 36: The Violonist, 1911. Oil on canvas, 94.5 x 69.5 cm. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

sadness of the serene smile, the golden-pink brushstrokes in the background, and the suppressed sense of celebration which there always is in life, if you are only able to find it. We must not forget, however, that Chagall’s eternal holiday exists in indissoluble, antinomical unity with his eternal pain, which is often hidden from the onlooker in the light-bearing stream of his exuberant canvases. There were always plenty of tragic events. Both in Vitebsk and in Paris. It would seem that already in the painted dramas of Vitebsk, in those archetypes of life’s conflicts – death, birth – there was some contact with the eternal, with the cosmic. But in the Parisian works we witness the appearance of something else – contact with world culture, a natural blending with its past and present; Chagall’s suffering becomes not just the suffering of all times but also transartistic. Medieval European stained glass, the paintings of Georges Rouault and the experiments of the Cubists all refined Chagall’s way of seeing, adding new riches to his “bank of associations”, providing endless potential for contacts and for allusions within his naturally unswerving, rather than carefully protected, individuality. Of course, Paris also added new themes and new plastic ideas to Chagall’s art. The artist not only looked at paintings, but got to know people. Talented people were drawn to him, sensing in him a true colleague; thus he became friends with Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Blaise Cendrars. Apollinaire was the first to mention Chagall’s name in print, in 1911, when the artist exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. In his studio, looking long and hard at Chagall’s canvases, Apollinaire said: “Supernaturalism, you are a supernaturalist (surnaturaliste)!”2 (we should recall here Dostoyevsky’s “fantastic realism”). In his memoirs Chagall spoke ironically of the poet’s appearance, but his attitude to him was one of tenderness and gratitude. Apollinaire’s sharp-edged verses, often blending into type-set hieroglyphic drawings (calligrams), were for the artist a school of clarity and creative courage, a lesson in the daring logic of twentieth-century thought. This found reflection in the famous picture Hommage à Apollinaire (1911–1912), in which the figures of a man and a woman form a single whole, both divided and united by Time which is embodied in a slowly revolving circle recalling both the face of a huge clock and the heavenly sphere seen by the alarmed gaze of a twentieth century astrologist. Perhaps it is in this very canvas, somewhat rational in concept but extremely emotional in terms of painting, that the image of Time-Movement appears so clearly in Chagall’s work, thanks to the strikingly tangible, bewitching combinations of primary colours, full of a symbolic subtext, which were to be so characteristic of Chagall in the future. Only his amazing bottomless, “prophetic” azure does not yet occupy its commanding place here. It does appear at this time but in other pictures. Apollinaire was probably partly right when, analysing paintings by Chagall shown at the 1913 Berlin exhibition, he wrote: “Chagall is a colourist, full of imagination, who, whilst at times basing his work on cheap commercial Slavic pictures, always subordinates them to himself”. This primitive captivating quality of the lubok was a mere suggestion of the conventional canon, the genetic password of the ancient Jewish spring into which flowed the bubbling stream of the present, the eternal and presentiments of the future, combining, as we have seen, with the European tradition. Two of the most important works painted by Chagall during his first stay in France bear the stamp of these very traits. These are the Still Life with a Lamp (1911) and Golgotha (1912). The first picture is devoid of any tension within the subject itself and its plastic dramatism could be likened to that of Cézanne or Van Gogh, but only in the strength of its effect: the artistic structure is radically different; it is both older and more modem. Older in its primordial, almost magical emanating light which throws us into confusion; more modem in its Cubism, refracting objects in a totally new way and animated à la Chagall. 37

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Page 38: The Poet (Half Past Three), 1911. Oil on canvas, 197 x 146 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA. Page 39: Hommage à Apollinaire, 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 109 x 198 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Up to this time that Chagallian suffering formed part of the event itself and was very often strengthened by the substance of art, to use the language of the Symbolists. Here the crimson bodies, which seem to be scorching hot, of the harshly rectangularized jug and cup shudder and shake, and the paraffin lamp bums with a dark flame – the forerunner of the numerous lamps in Chagall’s later paintings. And all this exists within the sonorous Chagallian azure, magically creating light from dark; in the primordial blue which seems to have been sensed by the master, seen by him in prophetic dreams and presented to the world. This azure – light and transparent yet dense – was later to be nocturnal, and threatening, and radiant. Here it is created with great pain and a presentiment of “unheard changes and unseen mutinies” (A. Blok). Similar convulsions of inorganic matter were known both to Picasso and, earlier, to Van Gogh. Essentially, the capacity of an object to express the pain of the artist through a certain amount of distortion was inherent in the art of all ages. To this tendency Chagall brought less rational refinement than Picasso less spiritual spasm than Van Gogh, less cosmic, timeless alarm than Cézanne. Chagall’s work had another quality – the intuition of a child who believes more in the unseen than in ordinary reality, combined with such great sympathy for the world that he was able to discern even the pain of objects. Of course we see influences from other painters – Chagall was a European artist, bearing a dual burden – his own talent and powerful influences, but he was helped by the primordial nature of his artistic emotions stretching back into atavistic memory, into universal and Jewish cultural traditions. It would seem that here, in Paris, he freed himself from the everyday subjects and 39

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Page 40: Maternity (Pregnant Woman), 1913. Oil on canvas, 194 x 115 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Page 41: The Soldier Drinks, 1912. Oil on canvas, 110.3 x 95 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

realities he had known since childhood coming closer to eternal and absolute themes. Nonetheless this is not the case. The objects in the Still Life, resounding with painful European syncopes, are objects from Vitebsk. Behind the universal suffering is the pain of the small town living under the yoke of poverty and in fear of pogroms. These realities, however, were not always so noticeable: in Golgotha, for instance, they are barely perceptible. The originality of the picture’s artistic structure is not immediately perceived. At first there seem to be strong associations with the forms of Gothic stained glass and with the 41

brutal religious compositions of Georges Rouault, but this feeling soon passes. These connections do exist, of course, but here they are merely overtones. Rouault is not simply a source of influences, but rather a like-minded contemporary, one of the many who were capable not only of aestheticizing suffering but of truly making it into an object of both moral and artistic experience, coming close to distortion, similar to German Expressionism, yet remaining faithful to his own colouristic refinement. Like Chagall, and unlike the Expressionists, he seemed to carry the painting into the depth of the canvas rather than splashing it out on the surface. All these comparisons are, of course, fairly approximate, for the masters of whom we are speaking were highly individual, although at the same time they were united by a common suffering and common basic culture. The frighteningly splendid Golgotha deals with a grandiose theme which was a central tradition in world painting from the proto-Renaissance to Mantegna, to Rubens’s astounding Descent from the Cross in Antwerp. It reflects the culmination of the Christian doctrine – the redemptive act of Christ for the salvation of mankind. To turn to this theme the artist must have felt himself to be the equal of his great forerunners and must have experienced the inseparable need to relate in his own way that 42

The Revolution, 1937. Oil on canvas, 49.7 x 100.2 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris. Le Saoul (The Drinker), 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 85 x 115 cm. Private Collection.

Soldiers, 1912. Gouache on cardboard, 38.1 x 31.7 cm. Private Collection.

of which so much had already been said. Ancient tradition, the direction taken by contemporary art and Chagall’s distinctly personal approach have synthesized here into a fundamentally new image. The Gospel subject as interpreted by Chagall is now perceived within the context of totally modern conceptions about world cataclysms seen through the prism of the fantastic and of ancient legend and through the revelations of Guernica. 43

Jesus devoid of his traditional ascetic beauty, is perceived as a newcomer from another world – a stranger, not underfed and therefore rejected by the earthly world. The figures around the foot of the cross strangely combine biblical tradition with Cubist reminiscences, but most of all we see in them the inescapable sadness of Chagall’s early works, that sorrow which tears the soul. There is much in this canvas which forces us to recall that concept of the recollection of the future or, if you wish the premonition of the past. Once again we are referring to those traits which were so typical of Chagall – not only the combination but the synthesis of times which was consonant with all the experiments of the twentieth century. This is a very important aspect of the problem. The twentieth century sensed, recognized and “dissected” its historical roots with unusual acuteness. Peering worriedly into the future it now took refuge in passéisme, now sought a means of understanding the logic of the future through patterns in the past. Never before (despite the unprecedented nihilism of many avant-garde artists) had thinking people looked at the 44

Page 44: Paris Through the Window, 1913. Oil on canvas, 132.7 x 139.2 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Page 45: View from the Window, Vitebsk, 1914. Gouache, oil and pencil on paper mounted on cardboard, 36.3 x 49 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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past with such passion, with such burning interest. From the intuitive historicism of the Romantics of the early nineteenth century to the costume fictions of Ernest Meissonier, to the phantasmagory of Gustave Moreau and Oscar Wilde to the striking historical insight of Anatole France. The Gods Are Thirsty (1912); from the cosmic philosophy of Alexander Ivanov to the historic dramas of Vasily Sunkov, to the intellectual passéisme of The World of Art to the Symbolists, to the historical associations of Alexander Blok, to the trilogy of Dmitry Merezhkovsky… There are numerous significant example. Chagall was not one of those artists whose work had an intellectual basis, a need to pose and solve – if by purely aesthetic means – some theoretical problem. And he was not a captive of the visible world like the Impressionists. His philosophy was intuitive, his archetypal people and situations were inherent in his genetic memory and not acquired, as in the case of Picasso, in the process of artistic experimentation or the study of African art untouched by civilization. But Chagall, a man who was acutely aware of his own time, paid pointed attention to the past and the future, in so far as those things which above all occupied him in this world – love, death, suffering and happiness – have always existed. 46

Page 46: Barbershop, 1914. Gouache and oil on paper, 49.3 x 37.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 47: House in the Village of Liozno, 1914. Gouache, oil and pencil on paper, 37.1 x 49 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

But at that time even their eternal nature began to be cast into doubt. This can be seen in Golgotha. In Marc Chagall’s canvas the traditional subject, which is depicted in art in a multitude of ways – from high tragedy to almost Victorian melodrama – becomes a warning against senseless, blind severity, against the nightmare of misunderstanding which can lead to violence and murder. Everything here is alienated from everything else: those who suffer and the bearers of evil, brutal severity and elevated martyrdom. Everything here is united only by the stern beauty of the painting, the radiance of the colours, the community of severe rhythms (“Beauty will save the world” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky). It is difficult to find in our century a picture which contains so much both of the past and of the future. Despite all the contemporary twentieth-century formal structure, the figure of Christ is depicted in a pose characteristic of the early iconography of the Crucifixion: Jesus does not hang weakly on the cross – his arms are extended out to the sides outstretched as if in greeting to mankind; he does not perish but lives in death. Apparently Chagall was sufficiently well-informed as to the purpose and meaning behind the iconographical tradition. But even the future can be sensed here: lie term “alienation” had not yet been coined; the concept of “other-planetariness” had not yet appeared on the pages of science fiction, which was then only just beginning to evolve; nobody had yet endeavoured to draw together scientific, philosophical and artistic consciousness; but in Chagall’s picture we can already see the coming “strange world”. His talent did not discard the incomparable, but revealed this world as an established fact, maybe frightening but comprehensible. The beauty of Ariadne’s thread leads him out of the labyrinth of suffering. Archetypal everyday situations, perceived by Chagall from 47

childhood without pointless fear as inevitable, determine the harmony of his painting. Without shadow there is no light; without suffering here can be no comprehension of happiness; without death – birth. This how the stereoscopic nature of life is reflected in Chagall’s consciousness and in his canvases. But light invariably controls the darkness. To tell the truth, harmony in Chagall’s pictures is present more as a tendency, as a desire for balance, although this is far from always attained. The beauty of the painting and the majestic rhythms in Golgotha do not save the onlooker from a sense of interminable tragedy and. most of all, a presentiment of disaster, for the stunningly innovative artistic devices give rise to the image of an artist who is able to peer into the future, where everything is different: an image of the world and of one’s self. Here we can draw an analogy with the prophetic visions of Hieronymus Bosch, which anticipated the pictorial tragedies of Brueghel, directly linked with the real drama of the Netherlandish Revolution, that Hieronymus Bosch, whom the Surrealists liked to see as their forerunner. We do not know if Chagall was aware of the work of Brueghel or Bosch, but peering into the future he always rested on both the moral and artistic memory of the centuries. But his painting was of the present; it was his own. It is not worth, however, seeing a clairvoyant in the still young artist. In Golgotha there are quite a few elements of exploration, even purely artistic exploration, and a gloomy, almost ironic sense of the grotesque which recalls the work of Goya. But the echo of the past is undoubtedly still there. Now, with the distance of time, this is no longer in any doubt.

Page 48: Chemist’s Shop in Vitebsk, 1914. Gouache, tempera, watercolour and oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 40 x 52.4 cm. Collection Valery Doudakov, Moscow. Page 49: The Street Sweeper, 1913. Gouache on paper, 27 x 23 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg.

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Page 50: Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Mariassinka, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 51 x 36 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg. Page 51: The Street Sweeper (Janitor with Birds). Oil on canvas, 49 x 37.5 cm. Kusiodiev, Astrakhan.

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Page 52: Father, 1914. Tempera on paper mounted on cardboard, 49.4 x 36.8 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 53: The Newspaper Vendor, 1914. Oil on canvas, 98 x 78.5 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris.

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It is probably impossible to understand Chagall if we are perpetually surprised by the emotional contradictions in works created at the same time. The many-sided nature of the world, and the natural co-existence within it – not struggling with each other – of both pain and happiness, were evident to the artist. Once again – without shadow there is no light, without recollection there is no foresight, without suffering no happiness. That which we are used to call contradictions formed for Chagall the natural unity of everyday life. What is there in common between Golgotha and the famous canvas I and the Village, painted a year earlier (1911)? Between the scene of the Crucifixion and the playful, parochial mystery? Both a lot and very little, as there is between the suffering and the smile of one and the same person. It is the external appearance of a rebus of a man who has broken with the natural synthesis of the seen, the known and the unseen: that imaginary synthesis in which fairytale, myth and children’s notions of the world in themselves and around themselves fully and harmoniously exist side by side. The term “stream of consciousness” had not yet moved on from the philosophical concepts of William James into everyday art historical 53

terminology, but in this picture by Chagall the complex of human ideas is seen from within with disarming simplicity, dynamic and alive, like some visual internal monologue. In this monologue, which seems to be unseen and unheard, we find the “here is” that is an obligatory part of the fairytale manner and childish speech: “Here is a hill, and here is a man walking”. The broken, fragmentary nature of the world within the picture

Soldiers with Bread, 1914–1915. Gouache and watercolour on paper, 50.5 x 37.5 cm. Collection Zinaida Gordeyeva, St. Petersburg.

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Soukkot, (Rabbi with a Lemon), 1924. Oil on canvas, 104 x 84 cm. Private Collection.

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Jew in Red, 1915. Oil on cardboard, 100 x 80.5 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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Jew in Green, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm. Collection Charles im Obersteg, Geneva.

– this is, of course, a fiction – and snatches of impressions clearly convey the sense of “the thinking look” directed towards that which lives in the memory and in the imagination. Of course, this work does not have the carefully thought out, intellectually constructed quality of Proust’s Swann’s Way, a book which was being written exactly at that time (it was published in 1913). Here there is more of the folklore, epic, confessional 57

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Page 58: Self-Portrait, 1914. Oil on canvas, 62 x 96 cm. Private Collection. Page 59: Over Vitebsk, 1914. Oil on paper, 73 x 92.5 cm. Collection Ayala and Sam Zacks, Toronto.

quality of a man endowed with the gift of full and natural self-expression. It was impossible – particularly at that time – to intentionally invent the milking scene inside the head of the cow. It was only possible to show with striking directness the associative train of thought, of the acute and, of course, fascinating play of recollection, where one image is revealed inside another, like a surprise inside an Easter egg. The rhythm of the diverging concentric circles pulsates, permeating the whole structure of the picture, giving a planetary quality to the land, linking the specific with the general, turning the sprig in the hand of the peasant woman into a whole tree – sizes, as always in Chagall’s work, are confused; upside down reflections of people peacefully exist side by side with those walking normally on the earth. We should recall, by the way, that in the process of work Chagall often turned his pictures upside down: top and bottom were for him interchangeable. And beneath the Chagallian azure the Vitebsk cupolas shine eternally. And the mysterious festival of triumphant memory – the parade of associations – begins. The artist’s directness did not prevent clarity of composition. The captivating fantastical nature of the situation, the subtlest grief, irony and fantasy, and finally, the power of the colour – all this at times pushes his gift for composition, his rare sense of the whole, into the background. The head-long surge of the figures, the complex spatial mysteries and the rich “inspired” colour are invariably linked with the frame, enclosed within its field, setting off the central ideas, the emotional nuclei of the composition. In the picture Hommage à Apollinaire we sense the existence of an almost mathematically regulated scheme (which is rare in Chagall’s work); in I and the Village the 59

compositional logic is hidden behind an apparently improvisational quality. Of course, Chagall was above all guided by intuition; it was not natural for him “to verify harmony through algebra”, but the harmony created by him can, in the final analysis, in the unconsciously achieved result, also be analysed like some sort of rational model, although his picture is undoubtedly far richer than any such model. 60

Window at the Dacha, Zaolshye Near Vitebsk, 1915. Gouache and oil on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

The Dacha, 1918. Oil on cardboard, 60.5 x 46 cm. Picture Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan.

The centre, clearly set off by the intersecting diagonals, the plastic likeness of an hourglass running along the middle vertical of the picture (again the motif of time!), the flowers in the lower part of the hourglass and in the upper part the fantastical vision of Vitebsk, the sense of ever greater colouristic tranquillity which results from contemplation of the picture and which is achieved by fine colour caesurae between splashes of saturated 61

tones – all these together form a compositional unity. In such a fantastical picture, where the subject alone does not concentrate the attention of the spectator, the absence of such a unity can be fatal; the canvas could really become a chaotic visual stream, deprived of all harmony, and consequently deprived of full artistic merit Here we can also sense Chagall’s links with the traditions of primitive art, even of the lubok, in which intuitive compositional unity (as in a fairytale or bylina) is natural and essential. Despite its phantasmagorical improbability, the image remains convincing precisely because of the observance of artistic probability, just as in the rhythms of fairytales the existence of the Frog-Princess acquires authenticity, thus we see the Fiddler (1912–1913) going from house to house, as if along a footpath, his face as green as grass, against the background of a town in which space is confused as in a jolly dream. But the severely outlined and precisely balanced areas of the distant plane, their dark, somehow refined, hieroglyph, bring a poetic logic to the subject’s fairytale-like, improvised quality. Moreover, the glade in which the house stands easily turns into the earth’s sphere; since the tale of everyday life is not so far from myth, from parable, it always moves beyond the limits of ordinary time and space. Once again the essence of the matter does not lie in any purpose or programme behind the work. Chagall, when he explained his ideas in words, wrote not only naively but at times with something of provincial pomposity (although also with touching sincerity). His thoughts never fail to become a sort of interpretation of something that has already been done although they are set out as a concept, and not as an interpretation. But neither his sharp intuition nor his ironic mind were strong enough to encompass his own creation; this is possible only in a detached onlooker and also after a lapse of time, in the context of his work as a whole. For only now can we fully picture what it meant to paint in Paris this fairytale image of an eternally sorrowful violinist drawn from his childhood recollections; in Paris, crammed with contemporary art and classical art and arguments about the future of art; in Paris, already full of artistic manifestoes, satiated with both elegant and shocking works; in Paris, which had already tasted the aggression of Cubism, the impetuous colour of the Fauves, the Seasons of Diaghilev and the first experiments of the Constructivists. What great internal freedom, great talent and great sorrow were necessary for this; great truth to intellectual and artistic “genetics”. And yet despite all this he did not cut himself off from that which could be of use to him, his intuition finely filtering out what was necessary, rejecting what was showy but not necessary to him. The first critics, writing about Chagall in the 1920s, correctly noted that Paris gave his painting its own particular nuance3, a fragile nervousness and certainty of line, which now began to firmly and precisely resonate the colour, and in many ways to govern it. And the areas of colour, taking on a clarity of outline and, consequently, another level of expression, free themselves from approximation, pouring out with new, disturbing power. It suffices to recall the painting dedicated to Apollinaire.

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The Poet Reclining, 1915. Oil on canvas, 77 x 77.5 cm. Collection The Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London.

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In Paris, during the tour of the Ballets Russes, Chagall sought out Bakst backstage. Bakst came to his studio with well-known prejudices, for he had been against his pupil’s trip to Paris. Nonetheless he was forced to admit: “Now your colours sing.” Bakst showed rare breadth of mind; he was after all an artist of a totally different persuasion, but the members of The World of Art knew how to value artists who thought differently. What can we say? – Chagall’s palette took on a certain refinement, without losing any of its essential qualities; the emotional and conceptual structures became even richer and more unified, his Paris lessons clearly showing through the highly colourful, fervent fantasy. It suffices to compare Birth of a Child (1911) with the above-mentioned Birth (1910). The Paris picture, unlike that painted in Vitebsk, shows the unity of subject, space and genre; there is no complex link between arrested eternity and an everyday scene, or in any case this link is barely perceptible. Here we should note how from picture to picture the objects in Chagall’s works are filled with different, metaphorical meaning whilst touchingly preserving their everyday authenticity. The lamp turns into

Page 64: The Mirror, 1915. Oil on cardboard, 100 x 81 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 65: The Clock, 1914. Gouache, oil and pencil on paper, 49 x 37 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Time is a River without Banks, 1930–1939. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris.

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Wall Clock with a Blue Wing, 1949. Oil on canvas, 92 x 79 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris.

a candlestick, the washtub into a font, the bed into a couch. Of course, in this superb picture it is also not difficult to spot a colouristic device which is rarely found in Chagall’s work and which is used here not without the influence of Matisse – the combination of vertical carmine-pink stripes, uniting the ground and the bedclothes with the emerald-green of the cushion. And what is surprising is that this picture, one of the most refined and harmonious of Chagall’s Parisian works, seems to be lacking not in artistic unity but in a sort of unity in the artist’s intonation. The spell of Matisse (beneficial as it was) did not yet penetrate the innermost depths of Chagall’s art, did not go right through it; the picture is a rare example of a dialogue between the artist and his contemporary in which, on the path to pictorial unity, he for a short time lost the unity of his personal style… Of course, if one so desired, one could easily differentiate quite distinct influences in other Parisian works by Chagall. In composition, plasticity and colour the portrait of the poet Mazin (1911–1912) is undoubtedly connected both with the work of Cézanne and with Picasso (it suffices to recall Cézanne’s Smoker, Picasso’s Portrait of Jaime Sabartés, The Absinthe Drinker or Saltimbanques). One can even detect impressions from the early works of Chaim Soutine, who in 1911 had just arrived in Paris and also settled in La Ruche. But, despite all this seemingly 67

beneficial ocean washing at the stronghold of Chagall’s artistic identity, in this portrait Chagall’s brush is recognized instantly and unmistakably, as is his smiling bitterness and his ability to capture an immediate impression. We can, of course, also see the Modiglianiesque treatment of the eyes and the obvious reminiscences of Cubism, but what we have here is already no longer a dialogue but merely a faint echo. 68

Lilies of the Valley, 1916. Oil on cardboard, 42 x 33.5 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Gift of George Costakis).

All this is the more surprising because even the most attentive and partial observer is at times unable to distinguish the “Parisian”, Chagall from the “Vitebskian”. The artist was not full of contradictions, nor was he a split personality, but he always remained different; he looked around and within himself and at the surrounding world, he used his present thoughts and his recollections. He had an utterly poetical mode of thought which enabled him to pursue such a complex course. In essence, Chagall’s approach was something akin to the wise naivety of Shakespeare’s plays, in which the hero passes naturally from prose to poetry. At one and the same time (if not on one and the same canvas) he created both an elevated metaphorical world and a benign yet sarcastic picture of everyday life in Vitebsk, decisively standing aloof from systems and declarations and not joining any particular group. Not joining but not shunning them either. He followed what was going on in Russia with particular interest. And we can assume that Russian artists at the beginning of the 1910s in their turn were paying careful attention to the work of Chagall. The inclusion of the artist’s pictures in the Donkey’s Tail exhibition (1912) in Moscow is particularly worthy of note. The taste for lyrical primitivism and the philosophical folklore quality clearly brought his paintings close to the works of Larionov, especially those from the end of the 1900s. It is now difficult to say who knew more about the other (both Larionov and Goncharova had exhibited their works in Paris). The artistic problems which Larionov was then exploring were, probably, more concrete, more programmatic. But these artists – even at a distance of over a thousand miles from each other – were occupied by many of the same questions, they made the same discoveries with avid enthusiasm. For a short time their art “slaked its thirst” at the same source; this did not last long but their intense closeness is undoubted. The only difference lies in that Larionov, in fuming to a new style, to a considerable degree rejected the past, whilst Chagall always absorbed everything into himself, not rejecting but integrating. At all events, in Moscow his works were exhibited alongside those of Larionov, Goncharova, Malevich and Shevchenko – the flower of the Russian avant-garde. In Paris he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon des Indépendants. And on the way home, in the spring of 1914, he saw his own one-man show at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin, organized by Herwarth Walden, largely thanks to the efforts of Guillaume Apollinaire. He was already popular and recognized by the formost painters of the age and he returned to Russia a well-known artists. He travelled to Vitebsk for the marriage of his sister and soon he himself was married, to Bella Rosenfeld. Sadly, all this coincided with the beginning of the war. A painter with a European reputation, he was forced (in order to avoid army service) to become a military-clerk. The larger part of his Parisian works, which he thought of at that time without a great sense of loss, remained in France: some he gave away, some he simply did not remove from the exhibitions. His life was difficult, but he continued to work. His pictures from the first war years are an amazing conglomeration of Vitebskian sources and new perceptions of his native land, of his Parisian lessons, of fine artistry and breakthroughs into new areas of consciousness. He passed through his imagination so many instantaneous, chance – or so it might appear! – impressions, uniting them at one moment with a smile, at another in elevated meditation that it seems it can all scarcely be within the scope of one artist. In late 1914 and early 1915 – the most difficult time in Chagall’s life – three powerful artistic tendencies, each of which was, on its own, extremely significant, took shape and existed side by side in complex interaction in his art. First was that same ordinary life in Vitebsk, enriched with a very slightly more lyrical pensiveness than before and with an echo of French colouring – now barely perceptible, now totally obvious. Second was a clear striving towards the use of poetical and philosophical metaphor 69

as a form of comprehending the most dramatic aspects of life, in which we can trace the development of the central conceptions of his art – Time and Space. Finally, thirdly, it is a marked Symbolistic basis to his work which is seen in a whole series of paintings united by their tense, disturbed and polysemantic subtext and completely defined formal system. It seems that it was at this very time, after his return from Paris, after his contact – still only somewhat fragmentary – with Russian culture, that the artist truly revealed what had been accumulating within him during his years abroad. It was at this very time that it became clear that his artistic perception was even richer and more complex than one could judge from an acquaintance with his Parisian works. The pictures painted in Vitebsk soon after his arrival reveal an echo of Paris only after extremely close study. At first one could even prove the opposite: the appearance of his native town is sharpened and made more acute by nostalgia not only for Vitebsk itself but also for the untroubled simplicity of his perceptions before he went to Paris. Thus we see the Barbershop (1914) and the Chemist’s Shop in Vitebsk (1914). One’s eyes literally “feel” the happy touch of the brush on the beloved motifs, on their humble and undying charm, on their amusing and dear everyday life, on signs, roofs and fences, on eccentric and good people. Thus a man speaks with delight in his native tongue after a break, at times hesitating for a second in the search for the right word, then pronouncing it, savouring it and listening intently to it. It is well known that love for one’s native tongue is sharpened by the study of another language, but that new language is also able to enrich the language of one’s childhood. Through the classically Chagallian azure of the Vitebek sky we can at times fleetingly glimpse the volatile blueness of the Impressionist palette or the viscous blue of Cézanne, and a new lightness of touch appears m the movement of the brush. But the artist’s deep evolution is not revealed suddenly, not in one work but in the whole stream of works from the period of the mid-1910s. This particularly concerns his picturemetaphors, pictures in which time stops in self-contemplation, splitting and synthesizing. The time has come to speak about what is thought to be Chagall’s central work from this post-Parisian period. About the Mirror (1915). “…It’s a strange thing – a mirror: a frame, like an ordinary picture, and at the same time in it you can see hundreds of different pictures, both very alive and yet instantaneously disappearing for ever”, wrote Chesterton. In fact the mirror is the most amazing creation of nature (the surface of water, the facets of rock crystal) and then of man. The very phenomenon of reflection contains something secret, linked with man’s tendency to reflection, with the sense of his own duality. Linked with fine art itself, which, even if it so desired, is unable to part with this tendency to reflection, to perform the function of a mirror. For even in the frightening phantasmagory of Picasso’s Guernica, so far from direct likeness to life, we can sense the tragic effect of the broken mirror of our consciousness, as in other contemporary pictures we seem to see something of the evil mirror of Hans Christian Andersen’s trolls or of the puzzling effects of computer animation. Not only the likeness of a picture to a mirror but even the negation of this likeness became truisms long ago, and the essence of the matter has not changed. The Mirror itself has existed in art from very early on and on many levels: the secret mirror of the old Netherlandish painters, concentrating “the great in the small” or personifying the Madonna (“the irreproachable mirror”); the mirror of Velázquez’s Venus; the giddy effect of the reflection of the royal couple in Velázquez’s Las Meñinas; the direct use of selfcontemplation in the mirror gallery of the Aranjuez family of Charles IV by Goya; the Bar at the Folies Bergères by Edouard Manet; the brilliant portrait of Henrietta Girshman by Valentin Serov; the self-portrait by Zinaida Serebriakova – we could quote endless examples. Nonetheless, in our century the mirror as a philosophical and artistic conception has born a dual load. Following Lewis Carroll’s heroine, human fantasy 70

Page 71: The Baby’s Bath, 1916. Tempera on cardboard, 59 x 61 cm. Museum of History, Architecture and Art, Pskov.

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passed through the looking-glass (the Russian translator created the incomparable term “zazerkalye” or “trans-mirror” which does not exist in the original), and artists themselves, both in their declarations and in practice, began to increasingly avoid mirror likenesses, striving at the same time towards metaphor and conscious reflection (here we must of course make reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror). The mirror motif is linked with another essential conception of reality, imagination and art – that of the Double. The most beloved offspring of the Romantic era, it was powerfully echoed and received new life in Russian literature of the last century, from Gogol to Dostoyevsky, passing then into the present century, noticeably touching painting itself – a classic example of the “mirror-double” is the portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold by Alexander Golovin. We should recall that the extremely interesting collection of literary criticism by Innokenty Annensky, published in 1906, was called Books of Reflections… Could Marc Chagall avoid this motif, he who so intently studied the primordial conceptions of life – Time and Space? The mirror, extending and broadening the world, is able to shake and change it; the mirror, creating the “double” of the visible and, like any reflection, seeming to enter into an argument with time; the mirror, in which the ordinary world can suddenly – frighteningly and gaily – appear to be foreshortened in strange ways. It attracted Chagall, delighted him and troubled him. In The Mirror we see the meeting between the earlier impressions of Vitebsk, unforgotten but now approached with new penetration, Chagall’s Parisian lessons and all the eternal questions – the essence of Time and Space, of the relationship between the 72

Page 72: Window Overlooking the Garden, c.1917. Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 46.5 x 61 cm. Isaac Brodsky Memorial Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 73: Interior with Flowers, 1918. Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 46.5 x 61 cm. Isaac Brodsky Memorial Museum, St. Petersburg.

small and the great. The work also retains the untroubled child-like perception of happiness and sadness through the prism of myth – at once elevatedly ritualistic and naive. Here everything is material, ordinary and at the same time fantastic: the table covered with a white tablecloth, the bentwood chair, the mirror with its gilded frame, the paraffin lamp on a stand reflected in it. And the tiny figure of the woman who has fallen asleep, her head sunk onto the table. Nothing more. But the mixed proportions and the world tottering in the mirror create the sense of a distinct, marvellously beautiful dream, in which things take on another, mysterious and prophetic meaning. In this comparison of the incomparable we do not find that stereoscopic naturalism of objectivized subconscious forms which was soon to appear in the work of the Surrealists: Chagall’s objects are too spiritual and harmonious, their unease is directed towards the heights and not to the lower depths of consciousness. For everything in the picture is created from the substance of art, in other words, the onlooker sees not a counterfeit object, not its illusion, but plastic formulas brought to life and refined to “unprecedented simplicity” (Boris Pasternak). The combination of elements here is amazing but does not seem unnatural, for after all there are dreams against which our perception does not protest, on the contrary finding in them that connection between objects which is lost in everyday life. Paraffin lamp is not very large but, on the table of the most spacious room in the house, on the white tablecloth, it seems to grow almost physically into some sort of light-bearing altar, and its Empire-style stand (as they wrote in the prospectuses of popular shops) becomes 73

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Page 74: Jew in Prayer, 1923. Oil on canvas, 116.9 x 88.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (IL).

– even more so in a dream or recollection – a monumental column. Both the dream and the mirror in the dream enlarge this amazing lamp, raising it up to the heights, like a heavenly body rising up over everyday materiality. And the object acquires a threefold quality: it is at once an ordinary paraffin lamp with pretensions to parochial luxury, a light which illuminates a chamber, and a certain cosmic source of light keeping vigil with the darkness of the tenacious dream and overcoming it. Now we can already see that Chagall’s pictorial fantasies were simpler and more poetic than the analytical constructions of a theorist who seeks, here at the end of the twentieth century, unheard-of intellectual, or even worse, programmatic nuances in what is a quite uncomplicated picture. Of course they are simpler, of course they are more poetic. But is it in fact not in the very nature of a picture by a great master to give rise to associations and thoughts that are complicated, but also in harmony with the time, with its doubts and discoveries? The succeeding development of art bears witness to this: in Chagall’s almost child-like naïve symbolism there is the powerful subconscious inheritance of the artistic discoveries of previous generations combined with the lamp-sun of Picasso’s Guernica blazing before the onset of eternal gloom. Even more so that in Chagall’s work the lamp also reels in the shaken mirror of self-consciousness lost in a dream (or perhaps awakening). In Picasso’s work we see a tragic explosion and the darkness that comes after, whilst Chagall depicts the gradual fall of darkness, the “departure” of light. This is achieved by the fact that the lamp itself and its light grow dim, their violet-lilac colour range with its tarnished-emerald highlights seemingly “dying down into ashes”, giving way to the brightness of the gilded frame of the mirror. But even the lamp itself and the light are not genuine, only reflected in the sorrowful depths of the mirror glass, thus contrasting their crepuscular significance with the vulgar glitter of the frame. But this vulgarity does not remain within the bounds of pure painting, alien to any sense of directness; these relationships do not go into the “material of art”; they are rather within the consciousness of this small figure, which, while being hardly noticeable, nonetheless remains the meaning and heroine of the picture. No, here the “dream of reason” does not “beget monsters”, (Francisco Goya); on the contrary, whilst simple objects can frighten or trouble man, they evoke a host of different associations and the world becomes “alluring and broader” (Alexander Blok); man feels himself to be not within the room but out in the space of the universe. Here Marc Chagall’s pictorial magic is unbelievably great. Attainable only by a few artists of Cézanne’s stature, the harmony of lilac, green and yellow is as balanced in terms of colour as it is charged emotionally. The concentric waves of lilac and green fly out of the lamp in silent explosions, seeming to shake it and the mirror and the walls and the penetratingly yellow rectangle in the upper left corner of the picture; everything moves like a pendulum, its rhythm both lulling (the effect of a dream is like that of a rocking cradle) and catastrophically speeding up (the effect of the collapsed space) But everything here remains open to the sleeping – free – consciousness, for the pulse of the planet pierces into it. Objects come to life, are made bigger, more beautiful – as in a child’s dream. And. as in a child’s dream they are anthropomorphized. In his dreams man often feels himself to be small; spatial relationships and the proportions of objects are confused. This is in general characteristic of Chagall’s work: the things which are most important at a given moment are larger… The dramatic subtext of the picture should not be ignored. Let’s not forget that he had already painted Golgotha, he had painted the Still Life in which we can already dimly see that lamp which shines here, in The Mirror. Behind its clear disquiet this picture already has its own history, its own pain which has become transparent but has not totally disappeared. And again we recall here the pendulum movement – forwards and backwards – of time in Chagall’s canvases: in The Mirror there is no clock but there is the rhythm of a 75

pendulum, and that is why we can sense the presence of time, thanks to this very rhythm, and also to the fact that a viewer familiar with the work of Chagall knows how the artist was able to listen to time; in those pictures in which the pendulums of clocks flying beneath the heavens quiver disturbedly, in which time becomes material and reversible. In the unity of past and future we can sense the power of the artist over the flow of time. By strange coincidence, in the extremely interesting but perhaps not fully appreciated novel by Veniamin Kayenn, entitled Before the Mirror (!), the artist heroine writes: “Time moves without hands, as in Cézanne’s Black Clock, and it is, unfortunately, impossible to stop it. Actually it is possible – in art. But for this you also have to be Cézanne.” Let us add: or Chagall. The Clock, a gouache in the Tretyakov Gallery, painted a year before The Mirror, is a direct analogue with the latter: it even features a small figure on a chair, only instead of frame of the mirror there is the clock case, and what is rocking is not a universe but a real pendulum, seeming to draw near to the figure, as in the terrible story by Edgar Allan Poe. In The Mirror itself the movement of the pendulum has become an essential part of the plastic structure; time is not visible, but literally tangible, and this strengthens the multiple artistic and philosophical meaning and effect of the picture. The pendulum of time rocks the torpid nature of a dream, making it unstable, inescapably disturbing and yet – how paradoxical – tranquil in its own way. For the large disturbing objects surrounding the tiny female figure are painted with care and with an extremely fine sense of their relationship one to another and to the world. But they bear within themselves the agonizing presentiment of forthcoming catastrophes, seem to prepare man for the comprehension of the still confused language of symbols of the dawning century (the centuries do not begin according to the calendar), the fading light and endless reflections: the dominance of thought, the impossibility for man to be able to look into his own soul. The relationship between the great works of science fiction and contemporary art still awaits close study but in this context it is impossible not to recall Stanisiav Lem: “We do not need other worlds. We need a mirror. We do not know what to do with other worlds. This one is enough for us, and it oppresses us”. Chagall did not deal with any other world than ours, but in this he sought unknown aspects, generously revealing them to the viewer. In The Mirror of 1915, much of the coming art of our century is wound up in a tight “genetic spiral its introversion, its instability and its nostalgia for simple things for love and for childish dreams, even for nightmares, its presentiment of Guernica and Hiroshima and its belief in the redemption nature of humanity. His picture admits the power and significance of the subconscious but breathes into it an elevated and pure poetry. This picture is imbued with an amazing sense of cosmological eternity and – even if this is only a daydream – authenticity. “Lord, this is something terribly like life, like the most real kind of life,” wrote Annensky in his study of Dostoyevsky’s The Double.4 All this – The Mirror and The Double and Reflection – is too closely bound up in early twentieth-century Russian culture for us not to see here not only tempting coincidences but also a definite general trend. Of course Chagall did not base his art on philosophical literary reminiscences. His works bear witness to a freedom of association far from the spirit of theoretical and intellectual exploration of that period. But he felt its intellectual atmosphere with rare sensitivity, and thus his pictures are bound up with the most painful aspects of the epoch. But Time was an eternal theme for Chagall. Shuddering pendulums and reeling clocks which have been deprived of their many years of peace in comfortable corners in homes, clocks which have flown up into the sky carried away by strange beings from terrible dreams – these are always to be found in his pictures. In the face of this troubled time, free of ordinary reckoning, man seems to lose the sense of its movement in his own life, to stand still, to freeze on the spot. This is also seen 76

The Red Houses, 1922. Oil on canvas, 80 x 90 cm. Private Collection.

in the already mentioned gouache in the Tretyakov Gallery and in his late pictures, above all in the famous canvas Time is a River without Banks (1930–1939). A quarter of a century separates this canvas from The Mirror but the Chagallian victory over time asserts itself even in this work. The images of his youth in Vitebsk do not dull, they are not forgotten; they have simply taken on a furious fatal strength; they have become the embodiment of planetary alarm. A flying fish with wings which glow or reflect far-off fires, with black human eyes and a seemingly bloodstained mouthy carries the same clock – with its swinging pendulum of shiny dark gilded copper – high over the town and over the river (Vitebsk or Paris, the Dvina or the Seine?). The frightening vision rushes by above the lilac evening landscape, through the dark azure sky which breathes alarm; on the bank is a pair of lovers who seem to merge together in the melancholy evening, frozen in a sad embrace; the silent alarm-bell of colours resounds with the suffering of the earth (war had already broken out in Europe). And yet there is in the picture something which brings hope to a smile, a sense of playfulness into this world of fear: the fish seems to have a small human hand holding a violin, along the strings of which the bow slides of its own accord, conflicting with the distressing nightmare but, in the end, not overcoming it. 77

Words can seldom adequately describe Chagall’s pictures. Even if they were frighteningly material, like the canvases of Salvador Dali, the equal authenticity and striking tangibility of all the details would also merge into the narration of a distressingly stereoscopic, aggressively naturalistic vision. But Chagall’s most disturbing and fantastical canvases are based on essentially different rules, although – or so it seems – so much brings him close to the world of the sub-conscious – the natural habitat of Surrealist art – and to the deliberately childish idiom of the Dadaists, and to the frenzied passion of the Expressionists. Of course Chagall was an artist of his time, he was not prejudiced against the experiments of artists of other persuasions than himself; he lived in a world of ideas which they discussed and espoused and – what was much more important for him – in a world of works they created. He shared the concerns and understood the efforts of his colleagues; for him individuality did not mean alienation. If we look closely at the whole sequence of Chagall’s works devoted to Time, this non-alienation becomes totally clear. Moreover, without the most elevated Expressionist flights – from Ensor through to Marquet – Chagall would hardly have acquired something of his own. But the essence of his work is different: he certainly did not subscribe to this or that set artistic system, for within him reigned the happy inconsistency of an eternal improvisor. A pedant could always reproach Chagall with an absence of unity of style and genre even within one canvas. In art, the lack of correspondence between genres, as is well known, can be compensated for only by directness, by that all-powerful intuitive illogicality which proves its right to exist only through its final result. By what marvel are the lilac-azure landscape, the strange flying fish, the shifted 78

Page 78: The Grey House, 1917. Oil on canvas, 68 x 74 cm. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Page 79: The Blue House, 1917–1920. Oil on canvas, 66 x 97 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Liège.

spatial planes and the violin with the helpless hand all united into a majestic and serious, totally uneclectic spectacle, without pretences to Freudian revelation? Above all, apparently, by virtue of the artist’s ability to express thought and emotion, not subjecting them to preset construction, to any rigid stylistic framework. Sensing the true iconosphere of time and not shunning it, he listened above all to himself; in his picture we see the directness of the storyteller who is able to interrupt himself, to be shocked by his own words or to laugh at them. Apart from this, he was one of the few painters (writers and cinematographers did achieve this) who was able to sense that life itself had lost its unity, logic, and at times even meaning (one war had just ended, another had just begun), that its Kafkaesque cheerlessness demanded artistic interpretation, and a certain amount of this very inconsistency. And that the objections to this nonsense, to this Guignol, should and could be illogical in their childish optimism, like the age-old violin from his unforgotten Vitebsk, flying through the dark azure. The image of time which came into its own during the very earliest Parisian years, at first in Hommage à Apollinaire (the clock face like a starry sky), then in I and the Village (the barely perceived silhouette of the hourglass), is later no longer concentrated in an image but seems to be a character, perpetually recalling not only the fleeting nature of time but also its ability to stop, to slow down or impetuously, repeatedly speed up its movement. These flying clocks, in despair from the inexorable flapping of their wing-arms, are present even in his most important post-war canvases, continuing the theme of the 1910s. In the Self-portrait with Grandfather, Clock Before the Crucifixion (1947, collection of V. 79

Chagall, France) the flying clock is likened to a sun-comet in a light-bluish cloud of hands stretched out in perplexity. In essence, the iconographic basis of the picture is totally traditional, but a system of ancient symbols is introduced on the level of twentiethcentury perceptions. The disintegrating, almost absurd, illogical world is united by the naive beauty of Chagall’s colours; the sad-eyed little Vitebsk donkey is a paraphrase of the Gospel theme and the artist’s ironical alter ego, and the landscape beyond the figure of the crucified Christ is not biblical but Vitebskian. Wise time unites everything, making any explanation unnecessary, simply reminding one: memento mori or, more precisely, memento tempori. How many of them are scattered around in Chagall’s pictures, these clocks, deathless like the time which they so relentlessly mark off. They arise in the brief vision in the blazing wing of an angel (The Falling Angel, 1923–1947, Kunstmuseum, Basle), in a picture permeated, like the famous Obsession, with the sense of the apocalyptic horror of war. Everyone remembers Rcasso’s Guernica, but Chagall’s pictures, rooted in that same time and in the same understanding of the global nature of a calamity which touched all humanity, are worthy of no less thanks from the thinking person and the attentive viewer. As in Rcasso’s work – but not in the scorchingly bare, bitter, sharp like a scalpel, representational formula – but in a phantasmagorical and at the same time simple and natural form, like a childish and prophetic dream, there arises a picture of a desecrated, burned out, but not dead world. 80

Street in the Village, 1940. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 51.9 x 64.2 cm. Private Collection.

Here the clock rules both over suffering and over the eternal. The burning angel falls; the halo over the head of the crucified Christ is red, like a flame and like blood; a black circle surrounds the light of a solitary candle; a sinister fire blazes over the roofs of Vitebsk and the world. And yet life still flickers: the little yellow violin is ready to begin playing by itself; people calmly go home, and the angel with an upturned face is ready, as in some fairytale (or in the mysterious circus-theatre – how can one possibly avoid recalling Hermann Hesse and his Steppenwolf at this point – “only for the mad”!), to turn into an immortal phoenix. That which in the work of twentieth-century artists materialized in tangible forms, that which from the hidden recesses of the subconscious arose, or rather was brought down, to the level of aggressive, frightening lifelike forms and situations, in Chagall’s work remained on the level of genuinely artistic symbolism, causing pain and compassion but by no means any repugnance or physical fear. The phantasmagorical nature of Chagall’s world, of course, gives rise to associations, especially in his dramatic works, with the world of the Surrealists. This, we should say, also relates to his pictures from the early period such as, for example, I and the Village. We are not speaking here of what Chagall is good at or at what the Surrealists are bad. Salvador Dali created his own universe, showing the oppressive reality of visions and broken associations, seemingly illuminated by the impassive and blinding light of the operating theatre, bringing his frighteningly rational art to the level of a salon of the subconscious”. We mention Dali here not because of all the Surrealists he is closest to Chagall or more famous than the others. These two are strangely linked by their morbid passion for clocks, as if for the physical manifestation of time. Dali also painted clocks on more than one occasion, dispensing with their dead materiality, turning them into a half-alive, now disintegrating, now dynamic substance. But neither Dali nor any of his forerunners or followers entered into genuine, intimate, philosophical relationships with time. At any rate, their attempts in this direction seem, beside Chagall’s paintings, to be intellectual constructions rather than artistic revelations. Of course, there is much in which, perhaps superficially but to a certain extent essentially, Chagall is close to Surrealism perhaps not in his art as such but in his system of linking or dividing the seen and the unseen, in his ability – even if by different means – to penetrate the hidden spheres of consciousness. But Chagall’s art outstrips the art of the Surrealists in its spontaneous improvisational quality as the incoherent poetry of children’s speech outstrips the grave confession of a sick man in the psychiatrist’s office. Moreover Chagall’s visual stream of consciousness, and perhaps the bridge across this stream, was presented to the world a good ten years before the publication of Andre Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto (1984). It is curious to recall that Chagall’s perspicacious friend Apollinaire called him in his time a surnaturaliste. And it was he, Apollinaire. who was the first several years later to use the term Surrealism (1917). As always, Marc Chagall, coming into contact (whether at the very beginning or later on in his career) with a leading contemporary artistic movement, did not himself become part of it, but rather contributed more to it than he took. And while he himself was, to a great extent, far removed from Surrealism, the Surrealists undoubtedly experienced his powerful influence; they sensed the warm glow thrown by his painting into the nooks and crannies of the soul which had seemed so interminably far removed from the light. For Chagall and for his painting dreams were not a distressing piling up of forms suppressed by one’s consciousness, as they were for the majority of the Surrealists, but a happy fusion of the conscious and the unconscious, the liberation of intuition, the triumphant liberation of fantasy. As in ancient times man did not see the differences 81

between dream and reality, so Chagall did not wish to see these differences. There was certainly nothing artificial in this; it was a natural and powerful stream which fed his painting and all his perceptions and comprehension of the world. Chagall’s attitude to time and clocks is fairly dramatic. But the use of open, “primary”, playful metaphor in his paintings does not become frighteningly physical. Almost twenty years after The Mirror he painted during the war, in the USA, his Juggler (1943, private collection. New York). This is in fact a likeness of the Surrealists’ circus, in which the bird-juggler with a crafty human eye, standing on one human leg, holds a wallclock “thrown” over his arm. One might think that this is a direct copy of Dali’s motif, but this is not just a wooden clock which has become soft, alive or dying; it is, as it were, a depiction of a clock on a broad band, an abstracted image of a clock somehow drawn into a circus number. And in this there is a particular, Chagallian, kind of phantasmagoria: for the clock is again upside down, the face seems to be a rocking pendulum, everything has changed places, everything only seems to be; the whole image is formed of associations, as in Hesse’s “theatre for the mad”; only one thing is missing – the pronounced materiality of the Surrealists, which was too dogmatic for the free brush of Chagall. After the death of Bella, Chagall’s clocks stop. Wall-clock with a Blue Wing (1949) is perhaps one of the saddest of Chagall’s pictures. There is absolutely nothing infernal here, only eternal sorrow. The writer Yuri Trifonov related how Chagall, already old, looking at a reproduction of one of his pictures with the image of a clock, “muttered in a scarcely audible voice, not to us but to himself: How unhappy I must have been to paint that… “5 It is possible that the artist was thinking not of this particular picture but of his conception of reeling time in general, of its unavoidable and irreversible movement, of the bitterness of youth, of that supreme knowledge of the mystery of time which enables one to unravel the solemn and sad secrets of everyday life. But the artist’s words are particularly relevant to this picture. The flapping of the blue wing is sufficient for the clock to hold itself above the earth only with difficulty – and this in a picture by Chagall, where people and things so easily forget about earthly gravity. Thus we see the roofs of the houses, the pediment of the clock powdered with snow, the pendulum which has become a huge golden dot, a cluster of seemingly deserted Vitebsk houses, the strange cockerel looking dully from the heavens on the silent clock, the ghostly figure of a tired beggar picked out with fine blue-black lines, the discarded pink bouquet dying in the snow. The usual characters of Chagall’s visual company are split up in this exceptional painting; the metaphors which form living links are broken, their usual friendliness turns into entropy, into emotional collapse. And only within the clock case, as if within Time itself, barely discernible in the gloomy depths, cut off from the world by the stopped pendulum, are the lovers, pressed stiffly to each other, quiet, like their own ghosts. Yet another epitaph for Bella; one more of the many. So far, however, in discussing Chagall’s canvases with a certain neglect of dates, in approaching them from the angle of a common motif, we have seen – or tried to see – the artist within the true context of his moral life, of his spiritual and material fate. Of course Chagall’s work is inseparable from his fate as a person, but modem art historians are justified in their inclination to assess works of art as independent entities, as a sort of aesthetic fact, suggesting with good reason that without such a view it is impossible to perceive the work properly and to truly evaluate it. Perhaps to a person unacquainted with the origins and fate of Chagall his Clocks and his Time would seem different than to one who had followed his life and tried to penetrate into the sources and nature of his pictures. Different, but in no way less significant; it is possible that, on the contrary, they would acquire a sort of universality and mystery, a philosophical quality. For in fact a picture has an existence in its own 82

Concert in Blue, 1945. Oil on canvas, 124.5 x 99.1 cm. Private Collection, New York.

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right. And here Chagall’s clocks – flying, suspended in the air or rocking, surrounded by this strange quivering plasma in which objects and tokens of wretched existence blend with fantastical flowers and birds, with humanized, dancing objects and buildings – and this piercing azure – beating its way straight to the soul of the onlooker – are able, it seems, to stir up his consciousness, at the same time giving him a sense of approaching magical harmony. The realities of Chagall’s world are not comprehensible to those who do not know them or who have not read of them, and then these realities take on the significance of a Symbol, they have the appearance of a hieroglyph for sorrow or joy, since Chagall’s 84

Self-Portrait with White Collar, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 29.9 x 25.7 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louis E. Stern Collection, Philadelphia.

brushstrokes possess a magical ability to droop sadly as if running dry or, on the contrary, to spread, to fly like a firework. The poor houses of his childhood become Symbols of Poor Houses. There is thus a new level of less easily recognizable, but far more striking universality of images. At this point it is appropriate to return to that aspect of Marc Chagall’s art of which less is usually said than of others. Of his symbolic tendencies, or rather of his contact with Symbolism at the beginning of the century, in its most canonical (as far as that is possible) forms. People usually speak of Chagall’s own system of symbols. But the gouache Window at the Dacha. Zaolshye, near Vitebsk (1915), for all that it is wholly a part of Chagall’s artistic system, is nonetheless connected with traditional, classical Russian Symbolism. In his autobiography My Life Chagall tells of his dream in which Vrubel was his brother. Not many pictures by Vrubel were available for study at that time and Chagall did not even see all of those that were. There was something different here, something more important – their sense of “surplus existence”, to use Rilke’s words. Their penetration into the perpetual mysteries of colour, of pictorial metaphor, a tendency towards the absolute… Meanwhile there are no similarities with Vrubel’s pictorial style in Chagall’s work, at any rate not in this picture. The point of contact with the Symbolist tendency arises not so much on the level of volume or imagery as from a sense of that strangely significant, concentrated existence which the canvas gives us, the canvas on which is so marvelously reflected the “slice” of reality, astonishingly prosaic for Chagall. In his other works you will not find such a richly painted, almost tangible landscape as you see here in this wood through the window, strangely combining the almost Vrubelian fragile birch-tree trunks, seemingly denuded of leaves, with the rich dark green and the ornamental flowers around their roots. The window pane with its tottering frame (like a clock or a mirror) introduces a disturbing play of highlights into this peaceful picture; the white curtain with its pale lilac and violet reflections is painted with insistently heavy, Cézannesque materiality. The cup, the sugar-bowl and the jug on the windowsill seem totally unlike what you expect in a work by Chagall, for they have lost the fairytale quality and weightlessness which are the usual characteristics of objects in his canvases. And in this persistently stereoscopic, troubled everyday world, in which volume and space are treated in a somewhat deliberate traditional manner, the two profiles – the artist and Bella, pale, in a dim light blue colour, sad and aloof – one above the other, lying outside the given system of spatial conventions, seem to be visitors from another reality. The artistic situation here is paradoxical. With Chagall, the world usually becomes a row, a round dance, of associations, festive and ghostly, which seem to be emanations of the artistic consciousness, amongst which the hero – the artist or another character – is perceived to be, if not more material than one of the visions, then at least not as just another vision. Here we see the reverse: Chagall and Bella are unreal visitors in a land dominated by tangible objects. But, strangely, in this case too there is no sense of stylistic, emotional or plastic disharmony. This may be because the unusual materiality of what is depicted is rather a “plastic” declaration than a particular attitude. For even the curtain, painted with the precision of an academic still life, with carefully thought-out folds, reflections, fine shadows, has another self; it is like a powerful and unfriendly bird stopped in mid-flight, and the world totters not by chance, but has been disturbed by the flapping of its wings. This hyper-materiality forces objects to develop beyond their own meaning. Here we find troubled Symbolist associations. From here flows a heavy current of tense sorrow, devastating the soul, deprived of Chagall’s usual sense of festivity; here the world is insistently material, physical, whilst all the spirituality is concentrated in the faces of the artist and his wife, ghostly and unsteady. Alongside Chagall’s ever-dominant individuality, alongside the undoubtedly Symbolist associations, there is also some 85

element unusual for the artist, an undoubted contact with something alien which seems to invade his art. We find that we must always return to Chagall’s sensitivity to the art of those around him. It would be naive to think that an artist of his stature gave himself up to outside influences; rather he absorbed them willingly and with interest – art had long ago become for him as objective a part of reality as nature or people; for repeated reflection was an ordinary matter in his art. Perhaps it would be in general correct to speak not so much of influences on Chagall’s art as of how Chagall depicted and transformed the art of others in his own works… 86

Page 86: Wedding at the Eiffel Tower, 1938–1939. Oil on canvas, 150 x 136.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. Page 87: Lovers in Pink. Oil on cardboard, 69 x 55 cm. Private Collection, St.Petersburg.

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Lovers in Blue, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 48.5 x 44.5 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg.

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In the summer of 1911, the 23-year-old Giorgio de’Chirico arrived in Paris and showed his works at the Salon d’Automne. Chagall was able to see them before the exhibition, since de’Chirico was a friend of Apollinaire’s and an habitué of Montparnasse. Clearly Chagall was not indifferent to de’Chirico’s deathly stiff, lifeless, but emphatically stereoscopic, cold, material world, his series of associations founded not on the free transformation of the world but on a poetic, rational and at the same time paradoxical confrontation of lifelike, almost naturalistic forms. Moreover, in the work of de’Chirico – one of the founders of Metaphysical Painting – there was an inescapable sadness which always touched Chagall. And perhaps Window at the Dacha represents a delayed, but greatly fruitful reaction to Giorgio de’Chirico, giving Chagall an unexpected impulse to look at reality in a way which was unusual for him. Of course this could not have occurred if Chagall had not been deeply drawn towards symbols, an attraction which is quite clearly felt in the majority of his works. But this is a special case; there is another symbolic structure which arises like a cluster of different trends: Russian classical Symbolism, associations with metaphysical painting and a consistent objectivity which combine together to create a totally new quality – a sense of the material world advancing on the artist, a world which is almost aggressive, bearing within it the uneasiness and suffering of the dematerialized substance of man. This tangible landscape scene near Vitebsk is so unusual for Chagall, with its touching charm appearing through the oppressively threatening atmosphere of the “second layer”, an atmosphere abounding in symbols which somehow escape rational analysis but which can be acutely felt. This picture by Chagall is not the only example of such a vision of the world. The Poet Reclining (1915) is close to it in many ways although, unlike in Window at the Dacha, the hero’s face is far from ghostly and is just as material as (or even more so than) the surrounding world. Here the system of points of contact and associations with de’Chirico is even more paradoxical: the landscape, the trees, their toy-like, poetic outlines, the soft whiteness of the birches, the powerful relationships between the areas of colour, strengthening both the earthly reality and the fairytale quality of the landscape, all combine with depictions of animals which seem to have wandered into the picture from one of Chagall’s usual magical tales. And the face of the poet himself, his figure painted lightly but in the Cubist tradition of finely and carefully defined surfaces, recalls the faces of the mannequins in de’Chirico’s work. Basically, if in Chagall’s canvases we see man-bird and man-animal dancing an interminable farandole, if the imaginary appears alongside recollections and real scenes, then why do figures and forms of different artistic worlds, united in one canvas, give rise to perplexity? Only as a result of inertia in the onlooker’s mind, of course, since at times – as in The Poet Reclining – guests from other pictorial worlds create the illusion of unsynthesized contradictions. But with Chagall, even eclecticism maintains the effect of an intentional festive game, in so far as he, Chagall, was able with such ease to return to the integral, free world belonging to him and to him exclusively. There are few years in Chagall’s working career which are marked by the appearance of pictures so significant and yet so different as was 1915, and it is natural that a time of spiritual uplift, of happy love and marriage to Bella Rosenfeld should, for an artist with such rare ability to love and to feel happiness, be the most fruitful for his work. Signs of this surge of inspiration can be seen in the very freedom of his experimentation, in the varied genres and devices, the range of perceptions from the deeply philosophical and tragic, to the hedonistic and contemplative. In this year he also painted the Jew in Red (Russian Museum, 1915), a famous work which has been exhibited in different countries on many occasions. Chagall had the great gift of respect for old age; this was instilled in him in his family and became imprinted on his eternally kind heart. The beauty of old age is accessible only to a noble mind and a penetrative eye (we are not speaking, of course, 89

about stereotyped venerable grey-haired old men). No, Chagall divined the beauty of wisdom through his own unsentimental irony, through sympathy and pain, never sinking to arrogant condescension. Irony was essential to him. Old age often seems to be funny to the idle and unkind, and Chagall used his irony to defend the old men he admired from unfeeling smiles. Naturally, this was not a consistent policy, but a subconscious moral approach. It may seem now that this picture or, if you wish, portrait presents the image of one of Sholem-Aleichem’s or Babel’s heroes, but there is also in this old man a sort of general ideal of the majestic poverty of free old age, as in the early work of Picasso. The roots of the picture lie in his early experience and his own intuitively historical memory, in old Judaic traditions, as for the great Spaniard the roots of his art lay both in childish impressions and in Romanesque frescoes. For both artists this motif was to a great extent biblical, particularly for Chagall, with his tendency towards archetypes and subjects from myth and folklore. Chagall’s old man with his gingery-red beard sits in a pose which is extremely close to the early portrait of the artist’s father: his hands lie heavily on his knees, a cap on his inclined head, he gazes tiredly from under halfclosed eyelids and seems to be blind in one eye. It looks as if this same person appears in the drawing, in this picture and in the Geneva canvas painted at around the same time, the Jew in Green (1914.). All these people seem to have some sort of ritual weariness; they seem to be in a strange state: we can sense both everyday physical fatigue, the weight of their years and deep meditation – here we should also recall that Chagall’s favourite artist was Rembrandt. There is no reason to doubt the spontaneity of Chagall’s perception and process of work, but the stream of associations, the intuitive comprehension of the visible is realized here in an almost rational compositional scheme, the logic of which is happily broken only by a festive colouristic alogicality – the old man’s right hand is green. This green patch, echoing the green of the roof of the house in the distance, creates the contrast necessary to strengthen the overall red tonality, at the same time causing confusion in the onlooker, used to seeking insipid rationality in any artistic fantasy. However, the picture is not constructed according to Chagall’s usual rules of a free associational stream. Its hero is an earthly man, and he is painted with unusual tangibility for the artist; in this image there is nothing which only seems to be. And even the gingeryred beard which almost seems false – set against the white face, even the green hands do not destroy the gloomy reality of the sitter, but rather give it a certain nuance. In the same way the complex rhythm of the triangular roofs surrounds the figure in a rhombus, drawn, in its turn, within the orange semicircle of precisely depicted letters of ancient Jewish text (lines from the Bible). The usual motifs of Chagall’s magical tales are less vociferous here; they seem to have hidden themselves in the picture, but have not disappeared completely. The flowers on the tiny sapling under the window are of a timid light blue colour; the azure flames with dark radiance – now on the roofs, now in the clothes of the old man; the different coloured glass in the windows set in train their own rhythmic play; the stool on which the man sits melts in the compressed unreal space. Thus, looking more and more intently at the canvas, the spectator tracks down those plastic and spatial paradoxes, those fascinating pictorial surprises which, it turns out, create that “artificial” background which makes the figure of the old sage, with his beard of unprecedented colour, so real, so penetratingly authentic and sorrowful. In point of fact Chagall created the type of a man who had touched immortality, perhaps some sort of pagan deity, an idol of age-old wisdom. Both in this picture and in the Jew in Green the central coloured areas are similar in their emotional symbolism. In both cases the crimson beard of the first figure and the dusky-gold beard of the second are perceived not just as colour patches of audacious refinement but also as likenesses of blazing torches with drooping flame. This essentially coincides with the folkloric and 90

Lovers in Green, after 1914. Oil on paper, 48 x 45 cm. Private Collection, Moscow.

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mythological tonality which is more consistently maintained in the picture in the Russian Museum, whereas the Geneva version (the green cap, green face, golden beard and one golden hand) belongs to the realm of a direct colouristic metaphor, essentially removed from biblical tradition. But in what was for Chagall a blessed year, naturally what occupied a central place in his art was love. Like Rembrandt, who did not cease to paint Saskia until her death, Chagall painted Bella. But, as an artist of the twentieth century he did not content himself with portraits of the loved one but painted the portrait of love itself. In depicting himself and his young wife he was not too bothered about a likeness (this occurs in his work only as if by chance); he expresses feelings through his painterly world; he leads Bella through the labyrinth of his artistic fantasies. But the usual participants of his creative carnivals retreat into the shadows leaving the artist alone with his friend, and only painting itself is left to witness the artist’s happiness. Lovers in Green (after 1914), Lovers in Blue (1914) and Lovers in Grey (1916) form a whole series of paired portraits similar in composition and mood, and with very finely differentiated delicate nuances of colour and emotion. Lovers in Green is an unusual tondo set within a square the comers of which also contain a swirling, colouristically festive life, in which the basic colours of everyday life – blue, yellow and green – appear beside each other and are reconciled. An attentive 93

analytical study undoubtedly reveals reminiscences of the Fauves or the more gifted and audacious colourists of the German expressionist School in the faces of the lovers, in the painting, burning bright, pulsating like lava, and in the different juxtaposed, mutually complementary colours. This judgement is as incontestable as it is approximate. During his formative years Chagall absorbed practically everything that was of genuine value in European and Russian painting, absorbing it deeply and seriously, passing it through the “filters” of his own emotions and taste and adding it to that which was purely his own. It was precisely at this period of spiritual ecstasy that some of the pictorial fury of the Fauves and early Expressionists returned to his palette. We have not really seen such exultant, light-bearing colourful flesh in Chagall’s work before; some analogies can sooner be found at the other emotional pole of his art – in his tragic 94

Page 94: The Promenade, 1917. Oil on canvas, 170 x 163.5 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 95: Over the Town, 1914–1918. Oil on canvas, 141 x 198 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

pictures, such as Golgotha. There, however the colour is more closely tied to severe, even prickly surfaces; it does not have that living, tender quivering; we hear the resonant alarm-bell of suffering and not the blazing melody of happy passion. Chagall provides a rare example of the painter-psychologist who, purely intuitively, of course, penetrates not only deep into the character of man, into his consciousness or subconsciousness (here we are not speaking of the depiction of the associative stream, for in that the artist has no equals but only of the depiction of people), but into the complex, barely perceptible current of feelings which unite and transform people. His Lovers and his Promenades, in short his pictures of the 1910s, are connected with love and marriage – this is a whole poetical encyclopaedia of feelings, not merely a visual “grammar” but a visual philosophy of love. In this powerful pictorial suite colour reflects that very thing which Alexander Blok defined with the word “unsaid”. An emotional world, valid in its own right, is created by these contrasts of colour and their extremely fine gradations of value, by their unexpected disturbing reflexes, their nuances, seemingly overflowing from one character to another, by the sharply defined areas of colour which are suddenly juxtaposed with softly blending patches in the inevitable azure and in the daring use of black surfaces. In their relationship with this world the faces of the characters are like solo voices alongside a wonderful orchestra. This more than approximate comparison to a certain extent defines the particular role played by colour in the artist’s pictures of lovers, from the almost primordial passion of the Lovers in Green, touchingly introduced into an atmosphere of everyday contemporary reality (the humorously but finely drawn details of the peculiar combination of smart provincial dress with touches of Parisian chic), to the pensive 95

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Page 96: Lovers in Grey, 1916. Oil on cardboard, 69 x 49 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris. Page 98: On the Road, 1924. Oil on canvas, 72 x 57 cm. Petit Palais, Geneva. Page 99: Jew Holding the Torah, 1925. Gouache on paper mounted on cardboard, 68 x 51 cm. Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv.

silence of the Lovers in Grey. This last canvas is dominated by the youthful wisdom of the wife, aware other role as defender and consoler; it is an elegiac hymn to the eternal faith of two people who have created their own inviolable universe. In Chagall’s work there are not so many, or rather there are few pictures which have no irony, no scepticism, no simple playfulness. Here the young couple’s love is epic, like the love of heroes in ancient myths; they feel for the first time the joy of a sense of protection, a feeling which is perhaps more reliable than that of childhood, for a child does not think of the future whilst love always counts on eternity. But even those canvases by Chagall in which he consistently employs his entertaining and sarcastic fantasy are more than mere treatments of a given subject. Wedding Ceremony (1918), with its pink provincial Cupid, his eyes bashfully lowered, and the timid, clumsily embracing, smartly dressed newly-weds, seems at first glance to be simply a collection of those same Vitebsk metaphors, albeit refined and poeticized – the same house with its window lit up, with the curtain, the hanging paraffin lamp, the table covered with a white tablecloth. And of course with a fiddler, perched this time on the branches of the silvery leafless tree, playing that same eternal, inaudible Chagallian melody. The faces of the newly-weds combine that embarrassed stiffness which appears on the faces of provincials when placed in front of a photographer’s camera at a fair, and bitter pensive aloofness. Chagall’s ability to bring together incomparable, never meeting aspects of man – his lubok-like, primitivized mask and the secret, deeply individual workings of his soul, beyond which the door of the murky depths of the subconscious begins to open – makes itself felt here with particular, penetrating strength. This ability of Chagall’s allows us to speak of yet another aspect of his art which we have not yet had occasion to mention: of his unique romanticism, refracted through the prism of twentieth-century form-building systems. And this is, so to speak, the very earliest version of romanticism, related above all to the romantic conceptions of Hoffmann. It is extremely unlikely that Chagall knew this writer and in fact this is of no real importance. The Hoffmannesque vision of the world penetrated into many farremoved spheres of artistic thought and also reflected far more than the writer himself was able to say in his books. “Eternity unexpectedly knocks at the door of everyday life, unexpectedly reveals itself in the everyday, causing confusion in the soberly rationalistic and positivist consciousness. The superreal has looked into the real, or rather the superreal reveals itself in the real. The earth, immersed in ordinary life, in the vanity of vanities, in the play of limited interests, is not aware of a higher play – the play of cosmic forces, the play of eternity; it is blind and deaf, it sees an event without seeing its essence… But the real always retracts the superreal, time always contains eternity within itself.. the structure of the Hoffmannesque myth comprises not only mythologized reality but eternity itself, embodied in myth, introduced into the fairytale as a particular kind of ‘inserted novella’.”6 Indeed, it is in the work of Hoffmann and, perhaps, only in his work, that an almost petty concern with everyday life and romantically sparkling fantasy are combined with the threatening voice of Fate, of Thanatos, in a strange and bewitching way. Thus, as is well known, one of his gloomy heroes weaves a spell, calling up the spirits of Evil, reading exercises from a French grammar-book. And under the pen of Hoffmann this amusing strangeness turns into the cognition of the frightening proximity of vain reality and the diametrically opposed categories of everyday life, depending on what lies beyond the commonplace situation. Chagall’s work also has no borderline separating the funny grimaces of day-to-day reality from the heavy breath of eternity since the very structure of depiction brings about the potential intrusion of the “substance of art” into the very essence of the depicted. Thus the dark pitches of the root seem to slam together above the happy couple, forming 97

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Page 100: The Green Violonist, 1915. Oil on canvas, 195.6 x 108 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Page 101: Self-Portrait with Muse (The Apparition), 1917–1918. Oil on canvas, 148 x 129 cm. Collection Zinaida Gordeyeva, St. Petersburg.

a strange slanting cross in conjunction with the red wings of the Cupid. Again we see the hour-glass motif, in the upper part of which a fire blazes, dying down below in the ashy, mournful faces. With seemingly folkloric, primitive simplicity the picture digs up numerous different associations in the viewer’s consciousness, especially if he is already acquainted with Chagall’s work. Provincial ritual assumes its primeval solemnity, but the faces of the newly-weds seem to bespeak the sad finality of their life, particularly exacerbated by the aloof, severe, “superreal” cosmic landscape, within which both people and the glimpse of the room through the window are so fragile. And if we look again everything is ready to become a mere ironic fairytale once more, a provincial tale with a touch of good-hearted sentimentality. Chagall’s pictures play a cunning game with the viewer’s gaze, visibly proving how strongly art depends on the spiritual state of those who are able to see it. And the viewer, like the heroes of Hoffmann, is drawn into this fantastical world in which everything has a dual, and even a triple, meaning whilst preserving an integral artistic structure. The theme of love, at times exultant, full now of grim foreboding, now of deep thought, but always overflowing with a sense of happiness, continues from the mid-1910s essentially until Chagall’s last days, breaking off only after the death of Bella in 1944, and even then it was soon to be reborn in a series of striking pictorial requiems. But now, in the period from 1915 to 1917, this motif of head-spinning spiritual and physical 101

happiness penetrates everything which the artist paints. Thus his still life Lilies of the Valley (1916), an uncommon genre for Chagall, literally radiates ecstasy, as if reflecting the enraptured look of an artist in love with the world. In the strength of its effect, of the realization of a spiritual state through the objects depicted, this still life could be compared with some works by Van Gogh. But the two artists’ plastic principles are completely different and we can only be surprised that Chagall’s ephemeral, transparent painting, his tender play of finely delineated forms, creates an effect close to the pictorial storm of seething, passionate strokes we see in the work of Van Gogh… In the lives of many artists with a tendency towards complex plastic experiments, there are periods when life – with its traditional materiality and daily concerns – deafens them with its indisputable significance. Perceiving their own birth as some sort of mythologized recollection, they realize their death on canvas in approximately the same way. Chagall perceived the birth of his own daughter Ida in a totally different way. Magical vision and associative connections were reduced to nothing in the face of the simple wonder of the birth of his child. Wonders and visions modestly retired to the background, not, of course, to be completely forgotten, but giving way to the central miracle. Thus the child in the bath in the Baby’s Bath (after 1916) was perceived as the central miracle. Recalling Chagall’s previous works it is not difficult to note what links – at first glance – such an everyday scene with a mythologized picture like the earlier Birth. Both depict the luminous childish body, surrounded and protected by tender hands and looks, 102

Page 102: The Yellow Room, 1911. Oil on canvas, 84 x 112 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy of Christie’s, London. Page 103: Still-Life with Lamp, 1910. Oil on canvas, 81 x 45 cm. Courtesy Rosengart Gallery, Lucerne.

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Page 104: The Cemetery Gates, 1917. Oil on canvas, 87 x 66.5 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris. Page 105: Village Scene in Vitebsk, 1917. Oil on canvas, 37.5 x 54.5 cm. Private Collection.

and both show an ability to turn the little things of everyday life into the beads of a “pictorial rosary”, united by a single artistic logic. The elegant, somewhat Cubist faceting of the iron bath, and the weightlessness, the floating of the female figures, and the barely dimmed azure filling all the corners of the picture – all these are elements of the Chagallian mythology. Yet the earthly, instant moment of life, intoxicated with living joy, seems not so much to overcome the fantastical mirages of the majority of Chagall’s pictures as to set them at a distance. The fairytale birds are transformed into a toy gutta-percha swan swimming in the bath. Of their own accord there arise associations with Maeterlinck’s Bluebird, which was sought in other worlds but was found at home; the furniture takes on a stability, a firmness, and even Bella’s face, having lost its emotional complexity, has become the face of a mother, expressing happy, everyday preoccupation. Linked closely with this work is the canvas Bella with Ida by the Window (1916, collection of Ida Chagall, Paris), in which the magic of the artist’s vision enables one to see a pure genre scene in the brilliance of his colouring, although the sense of some concealed mysterious meaning does not leave the viewer. It was at this very time that the characters in Chagall’s pictures began to fly – above all Chagall himself and Bella. In fact, even before this Chagall’s characters had easily raised themselves up above the earth; unconstrained by laws of gravity, they appeared in the air, on the roofs of buildings, they became weightless and felt themselves to be as at home in the air as on land. Chagall seemed to master space; the people born of his fantasy and imagination populated the whole surface of the picture, regardless of whether it was land or sky beneath their feet. But now flight became an independent motif, a direct expression of a spiritual state, not even metaphorical but completely material. The sense of physical uplifting, so 105

familiar to people at moments of extreme happiness, was conveyed by Chagall with great artistic directness. We are not used to comparing artistic phenomena of different levels of significance, and probably unjustly so because they reflect in one way or another, the attitude to life characteristic of the time. It would not hurt to recall here the naive emotional fantasy of Alexander Grin, who was then famous and much published (and much read). In his books a yearning for and belief in the magical break through a luxurious and somewhat artificial exoticism. The smart provincialism which shows through Grin’s prose links him in some way with Chagall. Of course we cannot equate a world-famous painter with the author of numerous melodramatic works, but they have the same yearning for the marvellous. Chagall’s greatness lies in that he was able to find it through the wretchedness of the visible world. Grin had to use escapism, invented countries and cities. Yet they were contemporaries, although it is more than likely that neither was aware of the existence of the other. The first canvas in this “series of flights” was probably Birthday (1915–1923), without which other thematically similar works from our collections would not be so fully comprehended. This canvas shows a surprising mixture of plastic, conceptual and spatial structures which are totally unlike each other. A sober analytical study cannot really trace how this glaring dissonance blends into 106

Page 106: Russian Village, 1911. Oil on canvas, 126 x 104 cm. Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich. Page 107: Dedicated to my Fiancée, 1911. Oil on canvas, 196 x 114.5 cm, Kunstmuseum, Bern.

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Page 108: The Circus Rider, 1927. Oil on canvas, 23.8 x 18.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, Chicago.

one united melody: the vivid colour of the floor, the unsteady pictorial flesh of the wall, wrapped in bluish smoke, the black, almost Suprematist oval of the stool, the detailed and carefully defined pattern of the cheap carpet, the figures flying weightlessly (it is amazing how they are conceived in terms of volume, for at that time people had not seen the way cosmonauts hover on the moon, without the pull of the earth’s gravity), and the different landscapes through the windows – both by day and by night. It may well be that the sense of unity in this phantasmagory is achieved because Chagall – outside any preconceived rational schemes, of course – ingenuously and with absolute spontaneity conveyed that “severed” vision of the world perceived by the consciousness of a man staggered by happiness, when slices of reality, colour sensations, and odd objects seem – as is not really unexpected – completely normal in the blinding lava of happiness, when snatches of recollections and one’s own feeling of the unprecedented nature of what is going on revolve as if in a kaleidoscope, as in a strange masquerade in which various aspects of the visible disguise themselves, if you can put it thus, in various levels of conventionality. This may be possible only in the consciousness of a painter. And only a great painter is able to convey this feeling. As was rightly stated by the psychologist Lev Vygotsky, a man is able not so much to analyse a picture as to “rationalize the feelings it generates in him”. In relation to Chagall this is a very difficult task but he, Chagall, us, not concealing the alogicality of his own experiences. And the artistic handling of the most improbable moral and emotional situation proves able to affirm this improbability as a new, unprecedented vision in art. Chagall was one of the first to find an artistic equivalent not only for the absurd tragical collisions of life, but also for happy improbabilities, not fearing to bring together things which would seem to be incompatible. But the attentive viewer will see in this harmonized chaos a very fine balance of volume and areas of colour which, penetrating to the secret depths of what has supposedly been depicted only by chance, produces an almost classical unity, in which every colouristic accord has its echo, the traditional triangle dominates as a basic compositional device and the surging flight of the figures reverberates in trivial items scattered on the table in keeping with the rhythms of that flight. In the future Chagall’s characters were to be more confident in their existence in the sky, sensing the world as a universal environment for living, in which the earth and the heights above it both belong equally to man. “Chagall’s flying lovers are all of us who swim in the blue heavens of fate”7. But then, at the end of the 1910s, Chagall was still far from cosmological revelations; he was occupied above all by emotional explosions which led his lovers from fine reflection to open ecstasy, breaking across the bounds of ordinary life and overcoming – even though only in their imagination – earthly gravity. According to Chekhov’s “Black Monk”, existence in man’s imagination is a form of true existence. Chagall makes the imagined, or rather the genuinely experienced, into a visually indisputable fact. Dmitry Sarabyanov, in his essay The Elusive Face of Chagall, perspicaciously noted that only Icarus was unable to fly in the artist’s pictures, for he rose up to the heavens (in the myth) with the aid of wings and not by force of the artist’s will creating a universe with its own laws of weightlessness. The point is not that the sun melted the wax of the wings of the presumptuous youth but that Icarus truly, physically, did fly. And this physical flight is totally impossible in Chagall’s pictures. Yet Bella and the artist himself fly naturally over Vitebsk. Of course, in these Chagallian flights happiness is not mystical. Rather it is happy surprise that the impossible is possible, that the pictorial realization of happiness gives man the visible appearance of a spiritual state, that this appearance may be somewhat funny, like a jolly tale for grown-up children. Thus we have the famous Promenade (1917) – a large canvas, almost square (rare for 109

Chagall), in which two basic colours – green and violet-pink – are boldly combined, in which old Vitebsk, emerald-green, magical, is barely recognizable in the refined build up of Cubist syncopated volumes in which Bella, wearing a lilac dress, hovers in the air, holding her husband by the hand so as not to fly away into the heavens, and the artist himself smiles like a genial, happy clown who has created both his own happiness and this radiant world. And as always the mysterious and imposing painting of the sky, melting in the summer haze and signifying the cosmic element, peacefully co-exists with purely earthly symbols, the carafe and glass on the red shawl which seems to burn against the green grass. The cosmic quality in Chagall’s work grows out of everyday life. For a time the artist seems to forget about dramatic Ends and Beginnings, birth becomes only a reason for serene happiness; he completely stops recalling death; clocks do not beat out fatal time but stop it and do not hurry; the artist is as before in a state of unceasing flight. In the picture Over the Town (1914–1918) the action takes place within a different system of emotional coordinates. Here the play on the border between reality and fantasy gives way to the absolutization of what is only sensed. Flight turns from a game into genuine superreality, into something surnaturel, to use Apollinaire’s term; the two figures become a rushing symbol for movement which is independent of time and the pull of gravity. They summon up associations with major examples from world literature and art – from the flight of Faust and Mephistopheles (not only in Goethe but also in the paintings of Delacroix and Vrubel) right up to the then unwritten pages of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. The viewer is not deceived by Bella’s stylish shoes, by Chagall’s crumpled trousers, by the goat on the street far below. These intentionally picked out details of everyday life only emphasize (as in Bulgakov) the great significance of the miracle. And the superreality is strengthened and to a large extent determined by the soft crystalline quality of the green, black and, of course, azure patches of colour which make up the flying group. We should note that this is one of the last pictures by Chagall to preserve the slightly stratified rendition of space and volume – both in the figures and in the landscape of Vitebsk, spread out below in a detached, poetical vision. The distant summer lightning of Cubist perception gradually dies away, to blaze up at about the same time somewhat unusually in the large canvas Self-portrait with Muse (The Apparition) (1917–1918). This picture, not without a touch of deliberate refinement, might have created a sense of being excessively beautiful if it were not for the obvious irony, the alienation, the return to undisguised play balanced by a sort of painterly asceticism, which was hardly typical of Chagall either before or after this. The picture was painted essentially in two colours – grey and a faded blue – with scarcely noticeable tonal nuances, two diagonals cut across the canvas from corner to corner. Two bright vertical triangles form that same hour-glass construction at the centre of which, where the diagonals cross, a soft pink radiance swells up. The elegant youth at the easel and the muse flying towards him are painted with that system of fluidly angular forms which we saw in Over the Town. These two figures would seem to be only a refined visual declaration if it were not that beyond them we see Chagall’s usual set of associative objects – all those trivial objects of poor local life, the eternal lamp, the proudly smart chair from the front parlour. The picture, both lightly mocking and yet elevated, is yet one more act in the ever changeable but always recognizable “Chagalliade”. Every one of Chagall’s immense variety of themes had – to some or other extent – been born by the end of the 1910s. It was at this time that he began to paint the circus (he later worked a good deal for the theatre but as a spectator he preferred the circus). This is understandable. The circus combines definitive gesture and skill built up over the centuries, excluding passing fashion and empty meaning; it has the primacy of ancient mystery, of myth almost made real; there is the pride of people (and also of animals!) in their dexterity, their daring, their 110

Page 111: Lovers, 1929. Oil on canvas, 55 x 38 cm. Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv.

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Page 112: The Acrobat, 1930. Oil on canvas, 117 x 73.5 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. Page 113: The Cock, 1929. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

confidence, their oneness with the music, in their unified rhythm, which permits them at the necessary moment to catch the hand of their partner, to judge the movement of the trapeze, without which the performance would fail. One could write a whole book about Chagall’s circus, as indeed the artist himself essentially did, publishing in 1967 a unique album of coloured and black-and-white lithographs, Circus, with his own text. Chagall’s circus can be the dwelling-place of unrestrained, giddy happiness, in which acrobats, riders, clowns, even saddle-horses sense 113

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Page 114: The Juggler, 1943. Oil on canvas, 109.9 x 79.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (IL). Page 115: To My Wife, 1933–1944. Oil on canvas, 107 x 178.8 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris.

their “star moments”, sense that they are marvellous and agile, that the music and applause ring out for them, that the whole world admires them; but it can also be strange and threatening, frightening and mysterious (as in the Circuses of the war and pre-war years). It can be anything; it blends the whole world within itself and an almost indispensable part of this world is formed by elements of recollections of Vitebsk, dotted around like incrusted jewels… The happy and uneasy pictures of the years 1917 to 1919, for all their significance, did not alone occupy Chagall; moreover he, in love – it would seem – only with art, with Bella, and with his love for her, turned out to be able to evaluate and take in, with both heart and mind, the grandiose events which took place in 1917. In October 1917 Chagall was in Petrograd. An already recognized, even a famous artist, a regular participant in major exhibitions in the capital and in Moscow, he, of course, did not subscribe to the programme of any particular group – even the most serious and imposing. Thus, showing his works together with the members of the Jack of Diamonds, he could hardly be viewed as their confrère. He was too much of an individual, although for all its brilliance his painting was neither flaunting nor aggressive. He was thirty years old, he could live in harmony with himself, but he was unable to remain indifferent to what was going on around him. By November 1917 he was in Vitebsk. Later, with a mandate as Commissar for the Arts of the local Department of People’s Education, Chagall helped organize the celebrations in honour of the first anniversary of the Revolution. Later, in the article Art During the Days of the October Anniversary, which was published in the journal Shkola i Revoliutsiya (School and Revolution), 1920, Nos. 24–25, he wrote: “If it is true that only at the present moment, when humanity, setting out on the path of the last revolution, can be called Humanity with a capital letter, in the same way and to a greater extent art can only be called Art with a capital letter when it is 115

essentially revolutionary.” This judgment can seem naive, for it contains no artistic programme, but it does contain simple wisdom, and it fully complies with what Chagall was then doing in Vitebsk. All over Vitebsk Chagall (temporarily) requisitioned easels in order to prepare the festive decorations for the town. Judging by the few surviving film reels, the decoration was unusual, lavish and buoyant in spirit. The Tretyakov Gallery has a watercolour sketch for Chagall’s festive panel Peace to Cottages. War on Palaces (1918–1919). From this we can partly reconstruct the decoration of the streets and how the artist understood his task. Whatever our respect for the master, it is hardly worth overstating the value of this work. The radiance of Chagall’s colours, which can be seen even in this sketch, the rough grace of the cheerful, angry peasant, ready to smash the toy-like palace raised above his head, this festive angry giant with green hair and in a crimson shirt – all this is, of course, no more than a conscious hyperbole, valuable rather from its context in the decorated streets, amid raised flags, than as an artistic (even if fantastical and intended only for a poster) version of social change. And yet Chagall’s gift enables the receptive viewer to see in this far from finished sketch the complex fusion of delight, happiness and concern before the threatening strength which Chagall accepted, in which he believed, but before which, undoubtedly, he also felt some timidity. Chagall’s kind and sensitive heart helped him to find himself in teaching. A famous European artist, whom some of his colleagues were already inclined to accuse of exaggerating his gift, did not forget how difficult it had been for him to master his craft at the start, how easily talent can be wasted without intelligent and timely support. He set up the Vitebsk People’s School of Art in which his former teacher Yuri Pen began to work and to which he invited famous artists from the capital, including Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, El Lissitzky, Ivan Puni and Kasimir Malevich. He did not aim to follow only tradition or only the avant-garde; he invited artists of different trends, whom he valued very highly and whom, incidentally, he wished to help – it was then somewhat easier to live in Vitebsk than in Moscow or in Petrograd. In March 1919 he also became head of the Free Painting Workshop (Svomas). He painted a great deal and his pictures were shown at the famous exhibition which opened in April 1919 in the Winter Palace in Petrograd – the First State Free Exhibition of Works by Artists of All Trends. He was not a theoretician, but perfectly sensed what was necessary for the gifted youths who came to him in the school. “My dreams that the poor town children, who at home scribbled lovingly on paper, should come to join art, are being put into effect. But this is not enough: it is necessary that the artistic education received be of benefit to every pupil, without loss of valuable time, and that their work executed during training be the product of Art with a capital A, that the methods and devices used in the artistic education immediately follow a definite path, in order that it should not produce cripples and dead souls without hope of resurrection. But even this is not enough; it is also necessary that the institution providing an education and an introduction to art should turn sharply from the more understandable and dangerous path – the path of routine – and go along the path of the revolutionary in art, the path of experimentation. Above all this it is necessary and will be necessary in the future to beware of wiping out the individual characteristics of each personality working within a collective, for future collective creative work needs only a consciousness of the spirit and value of future times, not an assemblage of stereotyped personalities… We can permit ourselves the luxury of ‘playing with fire’ and represented within our walls, functioning freely, are leaders and workshops from the left to the right, inclusive.” Thus wrote Chagall as early as 1918 in the Vitebsky Listok [Vitebsk Leaflet], 7 September. These simple and noble judgments are devoid of any fanaticism, full of tolerance and respect for his students. His contemporaries were allegedly not happy that he assessed his talent too highly. Maybe they were unhappy, although, of course, he was not mistaken. But his 116

Madonna of the Village, 1938–1942. Oil on canvas, 102.5 x 98 cm. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

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Page 118: King David, 1951. Oil on canvas, 198 x 133 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. Page 119: Around Her, 1945. Oil on canvas, 131 x 109.7 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris.

students – unlike his other colleagues – never noticed any arrogance or a sense of superiority in him. Chagall’s teaching activity in Vitebsk ended in a dramatic way. Returning from one of his regular trips to Moscow (at that time he worked extensively for the Jewish Chamber Theatre) or, as he himself recalled in his autobiography, after an absence to buy paints, he discovered that his students were moving further and further away from him. Kasimir Malevich, a man of fiery temperament and uncompromising convictions, endowed with 119

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Page 120: By the Window at Night, 1950. Gouache on paper, 65 x 50 cm. Collection A. Rosengart, Lucerne. Page 121: The Cock in Love, 1947–1950. Oil on canvas, 71 x 87 cm. Private Collection.

an original, hypnotic eloquence, convinced the young people that true revolutionary art could not be figurative. To a certain extent he was supported by El Lissitzky, who also attracted the young minds with his appealing ideas in the newly developed realm of design. Chagall appeared to be a traditionalist in the eyes of his students. The conflict was agonizing and Chagall left for Moscow. It is difficult to imagine the artist, having already gained world fame, who would have the heart and would be so free of ambition as to go and teach drawing in a colony for homeless and vagrant children. But Chagall had no choice. In Moscow he found himself in a difficult situation. There was no way they could pay him for his paintings in the theatre, and anyway money was worth very little at that time; Chagall and Bella were half-starving with their small daughter. But he worked. He taught orphans, famished, worn out, whose eyes, in his own words, did not want to or could not smile. And – to use his expression – they threw themselves upon the paints like animals. It is worthy of note that, if we exclude that wave of happiness which literally lifted Chagall’s art to totally new heights (his marriage to Bella), the external circumstances of his life had up to this time hardly told on his work. The internal workings of his soul were only indirectly connected with the external movings of his life. His most tragic works, Golgotha, for example, were painted at a time of relative spiritual peace. Thus we should not be surprised that the paintings of what was for him a very difficult time – the early 1920s – barely show any traces of dejection. The mood of The Blue House (1917–1920) is far from the euphoria of the portraits 121

Page 122: Artist at Easel, 1955.

of lovers. Here we see the invariably faceted “pensive” forms and the texture of the brick is conveyed with a striking accuracy rare for Chagall, although this, it is true, is contrasted by the totally fantastical colour of the wooden house. At the very first glance the viewer can see – how did the artist manage to do it? – that this is not a house painted violet-blue, but a house of ordinary logs which seems to radiate its own amazing colour. There is a distant kinship with Vrubel, in whose pictures crystalline forms themselves create light and colour from within. 122

Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm. Private Collection. Page 123: Champ de Mars, 1954–1955. Oil on canvas, 149.5 x 105 cm. Folkwang Museum, Essen.

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But here, in Chagall’s picture, in which the buildings and churches visible on the other side of the river have their usual colours – although also touched, of course, by Chagall’s colouristic sorcery – the strange blue-violet wooden hut, resting naturally on a brick framework, as in life, becomes an alienated guest at an ordinary feast of sun and light – a deserted abode, a body abandoned by its spirit – and thus transformed into a flickering ghost, drawing one’s eye and forcing one’s heart to contract dully. It may well be that today’s perception of this picture affords a typical example of seeing something through the prism of our knowledge of a well-known situation. Chagall was soon to leave Russia. He left without knowing that he was not to return for many years, that he would live more than sixty years abroad, that France was not to be a foreign 124

The Triumph of Music, 1967. Oil on canvas (wall painting), c.11 x 9 m. The Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York.

Apparition of the Artist’s Family, 1947. Oil on canvas, 123 x 112 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris.

land to him but was to become his home. But there was a parting; we now perceive it as a dramatic and crucial moment in the artist’s life, and the reflection of this perception lies in the sorrowfully shining “blue” house. Pictures, like books, have their own independent fate, and this work, into which Chagall put neither some special subtext nor even some intuitive, subconscious presentiment, has for the viewer become a sort of landmark. Chagall, having truly found himself in a difficult situation in Moscow, prepared himself for a brief trip. In 1922 the Lithuanian ambassador in the Russian Republic, Jurgis Baltrusaitis, suggested the holding of an exhibition in Kaunas. The ambassador’s request (he was also a famous Symbolist poet who wrote in Russian and whose collections Earthly Steps and Mountain Path were 125

The Dream, 1978. Tempera on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Private Collection.

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widely read in the early 1910s) was supported by Lunacharsky. Chagall and his family left for Kaunas. His works were famous in the West. He received an invitation to Berlin, where he was commissioned by the publisher Paul Cassirer to make a series of etchings (Chagall had only just begun to work in this realm) for his autobiography My Life. Then the famous Ambroise Vollard asked him to produce a cycle of illustrations to satirical Russian prose (Chagall chose Gogol’s Dead Souls) and the artist went to Paris. Thus his parting with Russia came about. At the time no one thought that it was truly a parting. Chagall was not the only Russian artist who lived most of his life abroad: Zinaida Serebriakova, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Alexander Benois, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and many others lived and worked, experienced success and oblivion in France and other countries. Yet there is something special in the fate of Chagall and his art outside Russia. The fates of the various Russian artists who lived and died abroad are varied. Many of them were very famous and their works became a natural part of the culture of Western Europe; some remained in their own enclosed world; others, such as Kandinsky became totally transnational masters. Chagall entered the worldwide artistic process as the bearer of the eternal pain of little Vitebsk, who absorbed the general through a nostalgic sense of his never-departing childhood. As in his early works the suffering and happiness of the planet were echoed in the ritual mysteries of the provincial town, thus the revelations of his artistic youth developed into his mature and late pictures. The Old Man and a Kid (1930 private collection. Stockholm) is a perfect embodiment of the theme of loneliness, old age and that goodness which alone is able to preserve the humane in man in any situation. Deprived of everything man acquires liberty; expecting nothing for himself, he is able to give help to others – even if it is only to a defenceless animal. The age-old type of the biblical Chagallian elder brings a penetrating sense of individuality to the picture; the sharp flexibility of the outlines the twilight intensity of the dark-green and azure tones set against the background of the snowy waste, the naïve credulity of the kid beside the sorrowful omniscience of the old man – this has the breath of eternity, matched only perhaps in the work of Picasso but with less passéisme, more bitter and alive. And the theme of love and tenderness – one which continues through to Chagall’s last days – coexists with the shock of the war. In its frightening concreteness combined with a sense of catastrophe on a world scale the picture Obsession (1943, private collection. France) – the burning sky the tumbled crucifix, the black flame of the candle with all that global apocalyptic horror and the undying mirages of old Vitebsk – can be justly compared to Guernica. And all this comes from there, from his youth. Chagall’s sense of his small native land as a fragment of the universe and his sensitivity to European artistic processes also enabled him to create stained-glass windows for Gothic churches in France, at Reims, and for churches in Jerusalem His wall paintings decorate public buildings in America, England and other countries; he painted the ceiling of the Opéra in Paris. Having grasped the mystery of time he, entering into its very movement was able to look into it particularly intently; he restored the beginning of life to the end; to the end of his century he presented the chaste wisdom of his early years. Both the passionate intellectualism of Picasso and the Olympian harmony of Matisse were alien to Chagall. None of his works is without pain, or without happiness. Essentially he created a pictorial myth of the twentieth century, but a very special myth in which there is no alienation from suffering and happiness and in which there is always the opportunity to understand them.

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e might be surprised by the fact that Chagall so often turned to graphic techniques, for the artist lived and thought in colour. Of course, a great master manages to retain a sort of associative polychromy even in black and white depictions: Baudelaire wrote of this in his analysis of Daumier’s drawings. We should leave aside the practical necessity of drawing for any art form, as we are dealing with something else here: why should graphic art have been at times so attractive to a colourist such as Chagall? It is not of course, a question of rational choice – Chagall was not inclined to such things – but of spiritual necessity, to which we are indebted for his black and white series. It cannot be ruled out that the potent poetry of Chagall’s colour, bearing within it an involuntary optimistic element, an immanent festive mystery, prevented the artist from expressing himself with sufficient harshness. This does not mean that all his graphic works are sad, but they do not have the intoxicating joy found in his paintings. Yet those enigmatic and strange qualities of Chagall’s art are by no means lost in his graphic works, but take on their own disturbing tonality. Almost all painters draw, but not all of them can turn their graphic art into a separate artistic universe. The graphic world of Chagall, as, for example, of Rembrandt, Goya, Picasso and Matisse, is grandiose and has its own independent artistic value. It is true that, as always happens in art, at times Chagall drew because there was simply no time or paints. Yet even under such imposed limitations the result was selfsufficient. Chagall made practically no working drawings in which he did not totally express himself artistically. None of his drawings is suggestive of a future painting – each is autonomous, not a vehicle but an achieved goal. We must confess that if Chagall had not produced his master-piece, the illustrative cycle for Gogol’s Dead Souls, his graphic works would not have preoccupied the viewer or the scholar to such a degree, for the artist’s drawings (usually in Indian ink) are not as well known or as numerous as those of his great predecessors. A small number of Chagall’s works devoted to war, not linked with it metaphorically or by association but depicting war as such, are made in graphic media. His soldiers – wounded, tired, aloof and thoughtful – are depicted in black and white, the ghost of death hanging over them with all its naked inevitability. The Lamentation, the best drawing of this series, is a marvellous combination of eternal pietà with the harsh everyday realities of war, convincing us once again that for Chagall there was nothing that related only to the instant, nothing that did not touch on the eternal, on primordial conceptions of existence, beginnings and endings, life and death. But here he needed the directness of a life drawing, and he raised it to a relentless, biblical simplicity. Chagall’s graphic works are more melancholic than his paintings not only because they are deprived of colour. The people or landscapes therein depicted are withdrawn from happy space, from eternal action; they exist in the cold field of the sheet of paper as if their links with the surrounding world have been broken. At times soft tonal transitions seem to be attempting to make some link with the unseen colour environment, forcing the viewer to imagine in the twilight transparency of the Indian ink the lilac colour of evening, or a blush on someone’s cheeks. But usually the black and white exist in sharp contrast, they exist ascetically, giving the viewer an opportunity to smile but not to rejoice. It really seems as though joy pours into Chagall’s works only through colour; even in the drawings depicting lovers, in which we can hear music, there is more thoughtfulness and irony than careless happiness or simple spiritual harmony. His graphic pieces allow one to consider the special role of colour in the master’s art, to consider redemptive and consoling colour, healing colour, which brings catharsis. Because even in his late illustrative cycles Chagall, for the most part, used colour (colour lithographs). But naturally, for Dead Souls Chagall chose black and white. Firstly, he was not yet acquainted with colour lithography, and secondly, perhaps most importantly, he

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The Painter and the Lovers, 1978. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 cm. Private Collection.

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130

Page 130: The Painter, 1976. Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Private Collection. Page 131: The Circus, 1962. Oil on wood, 41 x 53 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy Hammer Galleries, New York.

envisioned the world of Gogol without that colourful plasma which filled his paintings. In his watercolours Chagall remained a painter; colour lithography was mainly the domain of his late experiments and discoveries. Therefore Dead Souls is the most graphic of his works and, we can suggest, the most dramatic. We are speaking here not about the content of the illustrations, the literary source of which presupposed both pain and sadness. We are speaking of the rare – for Chagall – internal contradictions in the difficult combination of time and place, which intersect strangely in his Gogol series. Chagall’s attitude to literary works was exactly the same as his attitude to life itself. For him a novel or a poem (Gogol’s novel, as we know, was also called a poem) were odd atoms of a once integral world, from which he recreated a world only distantly, genetically, linked with its prototype. For whatever the artist painted or drew – mythological scenes, Parisian landscapes, purely metaphorical or symbolic compositions – it inevitably passed through his emotional filters, through his associative kaleidoscopic mirror, through the artistic memory of generations, through the harsh experience of day-to-day life. A parable always grew up on the basis of concrete events, taking on the flesh of reality – often pettily, pedantically reproduced – while the everyday scene was raised to the harsh significance of a parable. It is well known that Chagall himself, having been commissioned by Ambroise Vollard to produce an extensive cycle of book illustrations, insisted on Dead Souls: He was fervently attached to Gogol, and how could it not be so: Gogol’s oppressive sadness and bitter smile, his head-spinning irrationality – how could this not seize Chagall? Moreover, the artist had already fumed to Gogol, in particular in his designs for the production of The Inspector General in the Jewish Chamber Theatre (1920). 131

Page 132: Confidence at Circus, 1969. Gouache on cardboard, 59.5 x 57 cm. Private Collection. Page 133: The Sky of Paris, 1973. Oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm. Private Collection.

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III

Graphic Works

Page 134: Apollinaire, 1911. Pencil

We cannot say of the etchings for Dead Souls that they contain a modem reading of Gogol – this would be to greatly oversimplify the problem. Of course, the sheets are executed by an artist who was fully aware of the latest plastic experiments; of course, they breathe the twentieth century; but this is not where their importance lies. The usual purpose of illustrations is to give concrete form to a literary narrative. That which is only suggested by the pen of the writer in the drawings takes on unavoidable, material flesh. Chagall, however, dematerialized Gogol’s world, justifiably believing that beyond colour and tangibility, beyond all the earthly and fleshly brilliance of this world there exists a threatening and destructive subtext, a hellish despair and lack of spirituality, all that which would later come to be called absurdism or Kafkaism. Chagall daringly threw a bridge between Gogol and the artistic consciousness of the twentieth century. He saw Gogol through the prism of the visions of both Dostoyevsky and the Symbolists. It was not because he was a great connoisseur of literature, but because he intuitively guessed and almost painfully sensed the artistic atmosphere of his time and that which it brings to the understanding of a well-known classic work. But this is not purely a matter of artistic consciousness: Chagall felt with all his soul that only now, perhaps, would Gogol’s vision begin to be realized, as the prophecies: of the Bible, of Homer and Shakespeare are beginning to come true. But the illustrations to Dead Souls have a double character both in terms of time and of place. In a mysterious way, through the faces and landscapes of Gogol’s poem, come the forms of the Vitebsk suburbs and their inhabitants. And in the triune combination of Gogol’s ideas, of eternal, frightening and shaking truths and of indications of present-day existence, appears not only the world of the dead, but also the terrible world of the dying human souls. This series is one of the few of Chagall’s works in which the artist treats his characters very severely; Gogol is more lenient towards his heroes. In Chagall’s illustrations people are stupid and repulsive, although the phantasmagorical world in which they are depicted captivates the viewer with its ephemeral transparency, carefully thought-out rhythms and unprecedentedly rich graphic technique. The artist used a complex combination of etching and drypoint, aquatint and other techniques. Beyond the good-looking faces open up monstrous, inhuman muzzles; beyond the elegant bows we see the painful spasm; the externally amusing turns into cruel, pitiless sarcasm. It seems as though the endless suffering of a man who knows only too well the wretchedness of poor Russia found its reflection in

on paper, 33.5 x 26 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

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Page 136: The Butcher, 1910.

these unmatched, perfect works. Everything that Chagall produced for books in later years was excellent and, probably, even more artistic, but less personal, less linked with the root system of his fate and his art. Refraining from colour the artist apparently acquired that perspicacity and objectivity which was not, in principle, natural to him. We cannot guess the artist’s inner intentions. Chagall’s graphic works perhaps preserve more enigmas than his paintings. The vow of “colour silence”, the colouristic asceticism, were – we can presume – not merely necessary caesuras in Marc Chagall’s painterly exploration, but black and white records by an impartial witness in the artistic chronicle of the twentieth century.

Gouache on paper, 34 x 24 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 137, above: Study for the Rain, 1911. Gouache and pencil on cardboard, 22.5 x 30 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 137, below: Jewish Wedding, 1910s. Pen and Indian ink on paper mounted on cardboard, 20.5 x 30 cm. Collection Z. Gordeyeva, St. Petersburg.

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Page 138, above and below: Illustrations to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 139: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Above: Man Reclining and a Cockerel. Indian ink and white on paper, 14.2 x 14.9 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Below: The Little House. Indian ink on paper, 12.6 x 10 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 141: The Staircase. Indian ink on paper, 13.9 x 9.7 cm (oval). Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

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141

Old Man and Old Woman, 1914–1915. Indian ink on paper, 15 x 13 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

142

Wounded Soldier, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 22.6 x 13.3 cm (oval). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Page 144: Illustrations to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 145: The Vitebsk Preacher, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 52 x 42.5 cm. Private collection, Moscow.

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145

A Soldier and a Girl, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 18.5 x 29 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg.

146

Man With a Cat and Woman With a Child, 1914. Pen and Indian ink heightened with white on paper, 22.3 x 17.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Page 148: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 149: The Old Jew, 1914. Lithograph, 31.5 x 23 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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149

Street in Vitebsk, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 15.5 x 16.2 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

150

The House in the Suburbs, 1914–1915. Indian ink on paper, 15.1 x 14.1 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

151

Costume design for Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, 1920–1922. Watercolour and pencil on paper, 31 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist's family, France.

152

Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Page 154: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 155: Self-Portrait, 1927. Aquatint, 57.5 x 45 cm. Private Collection, Russia.

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Chronology of the Life and Work of Marc Chagall 7 July 1887 1906 1907–1910

1910–1914

July 1915 1915–1917

1916 1918–1919

1920–1921

1922 1922–1923

1926 1930–1931

1933

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Marc Zakharovich Chagall, the son of a fish vendor, was born in Vitebsk. Studied at the art school of Yuri Pen in Vitebsk, leaving for St. Petersburg in the winter. Studied at the Drawing School of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, St. Petersburg (then directed by Nicholas Roerich) and the private school of S. Saidenberg; entered the private art school of Yelizaveta Zvantseva, where he studied under Léon Bakst and Matislav Dobuzhinsky. Showed his works at the school exhibition held in the office of the magazine Apollon. Lived in Paris, on the Impasse du Maine. In 1911, moved to La Ruche. Met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, Alexander Arkhipenko, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and other famous artists and writers. Exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in Paris, with the Donkey’s Tail group in Moscow, at Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin (first one-man show) and also in St. Petersburg and Amsterdam. On the eve of the war, returned to Vitebsk. Married Bella Rosenfeld. Worked in Petrograd, served on the militaryindustrial committee. Exhibited in Moscow and Petrograd. Birth of his daughter Ida. Appointed Commissar for the Arts in the Regional Department of People’s Education in Vitebsk. Set up and ran (from early 1919) an art school in Vitebsk, where the teachers included Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, Ivan Puni and Kasimir Malevich. Headed the Free Painting Workshop (Svomas) and the museum. Organized the celebrations in 1918 for the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Took part in the First State Free Exhibition held in the Winter Palace, Petrograd. Conflict with Malevich and Lissitzky forced Chagall to leave Vitebsk. He lived in and near Moscow, producing works for the Jewish Chamber Theatre and teaching in the Malakhovka and Third International colonies for homeless children. Began work on the book My Life. Joint exhibition in Moscow with Nathan Altman and David Sterenberg. Travelled to Kaunas with an exhibition of his works. Visited Berlin and Paris. Settled in Paris in September 1923. Produced etchings for My Life and began work on illustrations to Gogol’s Dead Souls. One-man shows in Paris and New York. Worked on illustrations to the Bible. Travelled to Switzerland, Palestine, Syria and Egypt. Exhibitions in Paris, Brussels and New York. At Goebbels’ command, Chagall’s works were burnt in public in Mannheim. Exhibition in

Marc Chagall’s parents. Photography, early twentieth century.

The Chagall family. Photography, c.1906.

The house of Chagall in Vitebsk. Photography, early twentieth century.

Basle. 1935 Visited Poland. 1937 Granted French citizenship. Travelled to Italy. 1939 Carnegie Prize (USA). 1940 Moved to the Loire and then to Provence. 1941 Arrested in Marseille and then freed. Moved to the USA. 1942 Worked for theatres in the USA and Mexico. 1944 Death of Bella Chagall in New York. 1945 Set designs and costumes for Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird. 1946 Exhibitions in New York and Chicago. 1947 Exhibition at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. 1948 Returned to France. Publication of Dead Souls with illustrations by Chagall. Exhibitions in Amsterdam and London. Travelled widely in this and the following years. 1950 Moved to Vence, near Nice. Worked on lithographs and ceramics. 1951 First stone sculptures. Large exhibitions in Bern and Jerusalem. 1952 Married Valentina Brodsky. Visit to Greece. 1953–1955 Major exhibitions in Turin, Vienna and Hanover. 1956 Publication of the Bible with illustrations by Chagall. 1957 Began work on stained-glass windows (for Assy, Metz, Jerusalem, New York, London, Zurich, Reims, Nice). Exhibitions of graphic works in Basle and Zurich. 1959 Murals in the foyer of the Theatre in Frankfurt am Main. Exhibitions in Paris, Munich and Hamburg. 1963 Exhibitions in Japan. 1964 Ceiling paintings in the Opera in Paris. First mosaics and tapestries. 1966 Moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence. Painted murals in the Metropolitan Opera in New York. 1969–1970 Foundation of the Musée Chagall in Nice. Major retrospective exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. June 1973 Trips to Moscow and Leningrad at the invitation of the USSR Ministry of Culture. July 1973 Opening of the Musée Chagall in Nice. October 1977 Exhibition of paintings produced between 1967 and 1977 in the Louvre. 1982–1984 Major exhibitions in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Paris, Nice, Rome and Basle. 28 March 1985 Marc Chagall died at Saint-Paul-de-Vence in the ninety-eighth year of his life. 1987 Major exhibition of Chagall’s works in Moscow.

Marc Chagall. Photography, 1908.

Marc Chagall and Solomon Mikhoels with members of the Jewish Chamber Theatre on tour in Berlin. 1927.

Marc Chagall at the exhibition of his work in the Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow, 1973.

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Index of Works Reproduced Page 6: My Fiancée in Black Gloves, 1909. Oil on canvas, 88 x 65 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basle.

Oil on canvas, 191.2 x 150.5 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Page 9: Bella with a White Collar, 1917. Oil on canvas, 149 x 72 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

Page 34: The Fiddler, 1912–1913. Oil on canvas, 184 x 148.5 cm. Royal Collection, The Hague.

Page 49: The Street Sweeper, 1913. Gouache on paper, 27 x 23 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg.

Page 10: Birth of a Child, 1911. Oil on canvas, 100 x 119 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Page 35: The Wedding, 1910. Oil on canvas, 98 x 188 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

Page 50: Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Mariassinka, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 51 x 36 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg.

Page 13: The Wedding, 1918. Oil on canvas, 98 x 188 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

Page 36: The Violonist, 1911. Oil on canvas, 94.5 x 69.5 cm. Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf.

Page 51: The Street Sweeper (Janitor with Birds). Oil on canvas, 49 x 37.5 cm. Kusiodiev, Astrakhan.

Page 14: Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1911. Oil on canvas, 128 x 107 cm. Royal Collection, The Hague.

Page 38: The Poet (Half Past Three), 1911. Oil on canvas, 197 x 146 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA.

Page 52: Father, 1914. Tempera on paper mounted on cardboard, 49.4 x 36.8 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Page 17: To Russia, Asses and Others, 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 156 x 122 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.

Page 39: Hommage à Apollinaire, 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 109 x 198 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Page 53: The Newspaper Vendor, 1914. Oil on canvas, 98 x 78.5 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris.

Page 18: The Cattle Dealer, 1912. Oil on canvas, 96 x 200 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basle.

Page 40: Maternity (Pregnant Woman), 1913. Oil on canvas, 194 x 115 cm. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

Page 54: Soldiers with Bread, 1914–1915. Gouache and watercolour on paper, 50.5 x 37.5 cm. Collection Zinaida Gordeyeva, St. Petersburg.

Page 41: The Soldier Drinks, 1912. Oil on canvas, 110.3 x 95 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Page 55: Soukkot, (Rabbi with a Lemon), 1924. Oil on canvas, 104 x 84 cm. Private Collection.

Page 42: The Revolution, 1937. Oil on canvas, 49.7 x 100.2 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Center, Paris.

Page 56: Jew in Red, 1915. Oil on cardboard, 100 x 80.5 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Page 20: Peace to Cottages, War on Palaces, 1918–1919. Pencil and watercolour on paper, 33.7 x 23.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 23: The Wall of Lamentations, 1932. Oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm. Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv. Page 25: Promenade, 1929. Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 39 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy Rosengart Gallery , Lucerne. Page 26: Self-Portrait at the Easel, 1917. Oil on canvas, 88.9 x 58.4 cm. Private Collection. Page 28: Kermis (Village Fair), 1908. Oil on canvas, 68 x 95 cm. Collection Writ Ludington, Santa Barbara, California, USA. Page 29: Sabbath, 1910. Oil on canvas, 90 x 98 cm. WallrafRichartz Museum, Cologne. Page 30: Self-Portrait, 1909. Oil on canvas, 57 x 48 cm. Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, Düsseldorf. Page 31: The Artist’s Sister (Mania), 1909. Oil on canvas, 93 x 48 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. Page 32: Golgotha, 1912. Oil on canvas, 174 x 191.1 cm. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Page 33: I and the Village, 1911.

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Page 42: Le Saoul (The Drinker), 1911–1912. Oil on canvas, 85 x 115 cm. Private Collection. Page 43: Soldiers, 1912. Gouache on cardboard, 38.1 x 31.7 cm. Private Collection. Page 44: Paris Through the Window, 1913. Oil on canvas, 132.7 x 139.2 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Page 45: View from the Window, Vitebsk, 1914. Gouache, oil and pencil on paper mounted on cardboard, 36.3 x 49 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 46: Barbershop, 1914. Gouache and oil on paper, 49.3 x 37.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 47: House in the Village of Liozno, 1914. Gouache, oil and pencil on paper, 37.1 x 49 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 48: Chemist’s Shop in Vitebsk, 1914. Gouache, tempera, watercolour and oil on paper mounted on cardboard,

40 x 52.4 cm. Collection Valery Doudakov, Moscow.

Page 57: Jew in Green, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm. Collection Charles im Obersteg, Geneva. Page 58: Self-Portrait, 1914. Oil on canvas, 62 x 96 cm. Private Collection. Page 59: Over Vitebsk, 1914. Oil on paper, 73 x 92.5 cm. Collection Ayala and Sam Zacks, Toronto. Page 60: Window at the Dacha, Zaolshye Near Vitebsk, 1915. Gouache and oil on cardboard, 100 x 80 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 61: The Dacha, 1918. Oil on cardboard, 60.5 x 46 cm. Picture Gallery of Armenia, Yerevan. Page 63: The Poet Reclining, 1915. Oil on canvas, 77 x 77.5 cm. Collection The Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London. Page 64: The Mirror, 1915. Oil on cardboard, 100 x 81 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 65: The Clock, 1914. Gouache, oil and pencil on paper, 49 x 37 cm. Tretyakov Gallery,

Moscow. Page 66: Time is a River without Banks, 1930–1939. Oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris. Page 67: Wall Clock with a Blue Wing, 1949. Oil on canvas, 92 x 79 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris. Page 68: Lilies of the Valley, 1916. Oil on cardboard, 42 x 33.5 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (Gift of George Costakis). Page 71: The Baby’s Bath, 1916. Tempera on cardboard, 59 x 61 cm. Museum of History, Architecture and Art, Pskov. Page 72: Window Overlooking the Garden, c.1917. Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 46.5 x 61 cm. Isaac Brodsky Memorial Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 73: Interior with Flowers, 1918. Oil on paper mounted on cardboard, 46.5 x 61 cm. Isaac Brodsky Memorial Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 74: Jew in Prayer, 1923. Oil on canvas, 116.9 x 88.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA. Page 77: The Red Houses, 1922. Oil on canvas, 80 x 90 cm. Private Collection. Page 78: The Grey House, 1917. Oil on canvas, 68 x 74 cm. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Page 79: The Blue House, 1917–1920. Oil on canvas, 66 x 97 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Liège. Page 80: Street in the Village, 1940. Oil on paper mounted on canvas, 51.9 x 64.2 cm. Private Collection. Page 83: Concert in Blue, 1945. Oil on canvas, 124.5 x 99.1 cm. Private Collection, New York. Page 84: Self-Portrait with White Collar, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 29.9 x 25.7 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louis E. Stern Collection, Philadelphia. Page 86: Wedding at the Eiffel Tower, 1938–1939. Oil on canvas, 150 x 136.5 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. Page 87: Lovers in Pink. Oil on

cardboard, 69 x 55 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg. Page 88: Lovers in Blue, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 48.5 x 44.5 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg. Page 91: Lovers in Green, after 1914. Oil on paper, 48 x 45 cm. Private Collection, Moscow. Page 92: Double Portrait with a Wineglass, 1917. Oil on canvas, 233 x 136 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Page 93: Birthday, 1915–1923. Oil on cardboard, 30.6 x 94.7 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Page 94: The Promenade, 1917. Oil on canvas, 170 x 163.5 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 95: Over the Town, 1914–1918. Oil on canvas, 141 x 198 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 96: Lovers in Grey, 1916. Oil on cardboard, 69 x 49 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris. Page 98: On the Road, 1924. Oil on canvas, 72 x 57 cm. Petit Palais, Geneva. Page 99: Jew Holding the Torah, 1925. Gouache on paper mounted on cardboard, 68 x 51 cm. Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv. Page 100: The Green Violonist, 1915. Oil on canvas, 195.6 x 108 cm. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Page 101: Self-Portrait with Muse (The Apparition), 1917–1918. Oil on canvas, 148 x 129 cm. Collection Zinaida Gordeyeva, St. Petersburg. Page 102: The Yellow Room, 1911. Oil on canvas, 84 x 112 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy of Christie’s, London. Page 103: Still-Life with Lamp, 1910. Oil on canvas, 81 x 45 cm. Courtesy Rosengart Gallery, Lucerne. Page 104: The Cemetery Gates, 1917. Oil on canvas, 87 x 66.5 cm. Collection Ida Chagall, Paris.

Page 107: Dedicated to my Fiancée, 1911. Oil on canvas, 196 x 114.5 cm. Kunstmuseum, Bern. Page 108: The Circus Rider, 1927. Oil on canvas, 23.8 x 18.9 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Mrs. Gilbert W. Chapman, Chicago. Page 111: Lovers, 1929. Oil on canvas, 55 x 38 cm. Tel-Aviv Museum of Art, Tel-Aviv. Page 112: The Acrobat, 1930. Oil on canvas, 117 x 73.5 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. Page 113: The Cock, 1929. Oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm. Collection Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Page 114: The Juggler, 1943. Oil on canvas, 109.9 x 79.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Page 126: The Dream, 1978. Tempera on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Private Collection. Page 129: The Painter and the Lovers, 1978. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 50 cm. Private Collection. Page 130: The Painter, 1976. Oil on canvas, 65 x 54 cm. Private Collection.

Page 144: Illustrations to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Page 131: The Circus, 1962. Oil on wood, 41 x 53 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy Hammer Galleries, New York.

Page 145: The Vitebsk Preacher, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 52 x 42.5 cm. Private Collection, Moscow.

Page 132: Confidence at Circus, 1969. Gouache on cardboard, 59.5 x 57 cm. Private Collection.

Page 146: A Soldier and a Girl, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 18.5 x 29 cm. Private Collection, St. Petersburg.

Page 133: The Sky of Paris, 1973. Oil on canvas, 100 x 73 cm. Private Collection. Page 134: Apollinaire, 1911. Pencil on paper, 33.5 x 26 cm. Collection of the artist’s family, France.

Page 115: To My Wife, 1933–1944. Oil on canvas, 107 x 178.8 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris.

Page 136: The Butcher, 1910. Gouache on paper, 34 x 24 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Page 117: Madonna of the Village, 1938–1942. Oil on canvas, 102.5 x 98 cm. Collection ThyssenBornemisza, Madrid.

Page 137, above: Study for the Rain, 1911. Gouache and pencil on cardboard, 22.5 x 30 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Page 118: King David, 1951. Oil on canvas, 198 x 133 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris.

Page 137, below: Jewish Wedding, 1910s. Pen and Indian ink on paper mounted on cardboard, 20.5 x 30 cm. Collection Z. Gordeyeva, St. Petersburg.

Page 119: Around Her, 1945. Oil on canvas, 131 x 109.7 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris. Page 120: By the Window at Night, 1950. Gouache on paper, 65 x 50 cm. Collection A. Rosengart, Lucerne. Page 121: The Cock in Love, 1947–1950. Oil on canvas, 71 x 87 cm. Private Collection. Page 122: Artist at Easel, 1955. Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm. Private Collection. Page 123: Champ de Mars, 1954–1955. Oil on canvas, 149.5 x 105 cm. Folkwang Museum, Essen.

Page 105: Village Scene in Vitebsk, 1917. Oil on canvas, 37.5 x 54.5 cm. Private Collection.

Page 124: The Triumph of Music, 1967. Oil on canvas (wall painting), c.11 x 9 m. The Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Center, New York.

Page 106: Russian Village, 1911. Oil on canvas, 126 x 104 cm. Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich.

Page 125: Apparition of the Artist’s Family, 1947. Oil on canvas, 123 x 112 cm. Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris.

Page 143: Wounded Soldier, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 22.6 x 13.3 cm (oval). Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

Page 138, above and below: Illustrations to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 139: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 140, above: Man Reclining and a Cockerel. Indian ink and white on paper, 14.2 x 14.9 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 140, below: The Little House. Indian ink on paper, 12.6 x 10 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 141: The Staircase. Indian ink on paper, 13.9 x 9.7 cm (oval). Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 142: Old Man and Old Woman, 1914–1915. Indian ink on paper, 15 x 13 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

Page 147: Man With a Cat and Woman With a Child, 1914. Pen and Indian ink heightened with white on paper, 22.3 x 17.2 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 148: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 149: The Old Jew, 1914. Lithograph, 31.5 x 23 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 150: Street in Vitebsk, 1914. Indian ink on paper, 15.5 x 16.2 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 151: The House in the Suburbs, 1914–1915. Indian ink on paper, 15.1 x 14.1 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Page 152: Costume design for Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General, 1920–1922. Watercolour and pencil on paper, 31 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist's family, France. Page 153: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 154: Illustration to Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, 1923–1927. Etching, aquatint, drypoint and roulette, 38 x 28.4 cm. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Page 155: Self-Portrait, 1927. Aquatint, 57.5 x 45 cm. Private Collection, Russia.

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Notes 1. Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Thames and Hudson, London, 1961. 2. Jean-Claude Marcadé, “Le contexte russe de l’œuvre de Chagall”, in: Marc Chagall, œuvres sur papier, Centre Georges-Pompidou, Paris, 1984. 3. Camilla Gray, The Russian Experiment in Art. 1863–1922, Thames and Hudson, London, 1962, revised edition 1986. 4. Valentina Marcadé, Le Renouveau de l’art pictural russe, L’Âge d’Homme, Lausanne, 1971. 5. Aleksandr Kamensky, Chagall: The Russian Years. 1907–1922, Thames and Hudson, London, 1989. 6. Abram Efros, Yakov Tugendhold, Iskusstuo Marka Shagala [The Art of Marc Chagall], Gelikon, Moscow, 1918. 7. Susan Compton, Chagall, Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition Catalogue, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1985. 8. Cited after Pierre Daix, Une Vie à changer, Le Seuil, Paris, 1975, p. 422. 9. Ernst Kris, Otto Kurz, L’Image de l’artiste, Légende, mythe et magie, Paris-Marseille, 1987. 10. Ma Vie, text by Marc Chagall translated from the Russian by Bella Chagall, preface by André Salmon, Stock, Paris, 1931, reprinted 1983, p. 12. 11. Ma Vie, p. 81. 12. V. Marcadé, op. cit., p. 164. 13. Y. L. Obolenskaya, At the Zvantseva School under the Direction of L. Bakst and M. Dobuzhinsky, 1906-1910, MS preserved in the Manuscript Department of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. 14. Ma Vie, p. 108. 15. Bella Chagall, Lumières allumées, translated by Ida Chagall, illustrations by Marc Chagall, NRF Gallimard, Paris, 1973, p. 233. 16. Ma Vie, p. 92. 17. Ma Vie, p. 143. 18. Ma Vie, p. 142. 19. André Breton, “Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme”, in: Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 1928-1965, Gallimard, Paris, 1979, p. 63. 20. Ma Vie, p. 154. 21. Jean Laude, “Naissance des abstractions”, Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne, 1985, pp. 36, 37. 22. Ma Vie, p. 160. 23. Marc Chagall, Lecture at the University of Chicago read on the invitation of John Nef, February 1958, published in John Nef, Bridges of Human Understanding. The University of Chicago, University Publishers, New York 1964. 24. Ma Vie, p. 205 25. Louis Aragon, “Chagall l’Admirable”, Les Lettres françaises, 31 May 1972, Paris, in: Ecrits sur l’Art Moderne, Flammarion, Paris, 1981, p. 265. 26. This imposing building in Art Nouveau style was intended for exhibitions but the owner then built many tiny studios inside it. 27. J. Le Marchand, “Les écrivains, la littérature et Chagall”, La Galerie, 1973. 28. A. Efros and Ya. Tugendhold, Iskusstuo Marka Shagala [The Art of Marc Chagall], Moscow, 1918. 29. I. Annensky, Knigi Otrazheniy [Books of Reflections], Moscow, 1979, p. 24. 30. Yuri Trifonov, Vechnye Temy [Eternal Themes], Moscow, 1984, p. 627. 31. F. P. Fiodorov, Vremya i vechnost’ v skazkakh i kaprichchio Gofmana. Khudozhestvenny mir E.T.A. Grofmana [Time and Eternity in the Tales and Capriccios of Hoffmann. The Artistic World of E.T.A. Hoffmann], Moscow, 1982, pp. 93, 94. 32. Yuri Trifonov, op. cit., p. 620.