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Статья: Marc Shagall

Статья: Marc Shagall

Fiddler on the roof of modernism

Marc CHAGALL: 1887-1985

“He grabs a church and paints with the church,” wrote a poet of the cubist

era, Blaise Cendarrs. “He grabs a cow and paints with the cow. He paints with

an oxtail (With all the dirty passion of a little Jewish town).” “Soutine?

Stangely enough, no: Marc Shagall.”

Cendrars’ rhapsody reminds one how different the late decades of that hugely

productive painter were from his early ones. One does not think of late

Chagall in terms of the “dirty passion” and “exacerbated sexuality” that

struck his (mostly Gentile) friends in modern painting’s golden age, Paris

before 1914.

Instead one thinks of an institutionalized, not to say industrialized,

sweetness: the Chagall of the blue, boneless angels, the muralist of Lincoln

Center and the fresco painter of the Paris Opera, the stationed-glass artist

who flooded interiors from the U. N. headquarters in New York City to Reims

Cathedral in France to the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in

Jerusalem with the soothing light of benign sentiment. His quasi-religious

imagery, modular and diffuse at the same time, would serve (with adjustments:

drop the flying cow, put in a menorah) to commemorate nearly anything, from

the Holocaust to the self-celebration of a bank. When he died at the age of

97 at his home near Nice, Chagall’s career had spanned more that

three—quarters of a century of unremittingly active artmaking.

He was seen by an immense constituency of collectors and museumgoers as an

artist of the 20th century. He had a lyric, flyaway, enraptured

imagination, allied to an enviable fluency of hand; the former could waken into

marzipan poignancy, the latter into routine charm. He left behind him an oeuvre

of paintings, drawings, prints, book illustrations, private and public art of

every kind, rivaling Picasso’s in size, if not always in variety or intensity.

The number of novice collectors who cut their milk teeth on a Shagall print

(Bella with bouquet, floating over the roofs, edition size 400, later moved to

the guest bedroom to make room for a large photorealist painting of motorcycle

handlebars) is beyond computation. Chagall may have given more people their

soft introduction to art dreams then any of his contemporaries. He was the

fiddler on the roof of modernism. If he sometimes paid his spiritual taxes in

folkloric sugar, it may not matter in the long run – for at Chagall’s death one

consults the paintings of his youth, whose wild eccentric beauty is indelible.

Chagall’s was a textbook case of the way some artists receive their subject

matter, their grammar of signs, in childhood. He was a child of the Russian

ghetto, born in the town of Vitebsk in 1887; his father was a herring packer,

his grandfather a cantorand kosher butcher, his uncle an amateur violinist.

The imagery of music and shtetl folklore, mingled with the face of his

childhood sweetheart (and further wife), Bella Rosenfeld, furnished the

unaltering ground of his work for 80 years, long after the close-knit and

weak little societies it represented had been incinerated by Hitler. “All the

little fences, the little cows and sheep looked to me as original, as

ingenuous and as eternal as the buildings in Giotto’s frescoes,” he

reminisced in the ‘20s.

He developed his wry and sweet visions in the two great forcing houses of

modernism between 1900 and 1925: Paris and Russia. As a student in St.

Petersburg up to 1910, he came under the wing of Diaghilev’s designer Leon

Bakst; an enlightened Jewish patron, Max Vinaver, sent him to Paris that

year. He took a studio in a rickety building near the slaughteryards and

found that his neighbors were Soutine, Legel and Modigliani. Back in Russia

by 1914, Chagall waited out World War I (and was plunged into the Revolution)

in the company of Tatlin, Malevich and Kandinsky.

“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” – especially for a young artist, eager

to absorb what this supreme moment of untainted modernism offered. In cubism,

he felt, the subject was “killed, cut to pieces and its form and surface

disguised.” Chagall did not want to go so far, but the flattening, reflection

and rotation of cubist form gave his early paintings their special radiance and

precision. In “Paris Through the Window”, 1913, we enter a rainbow world, all

prismatic light and jingling crystalline triangles. It is full of emblems of

stringent modernity: the Eiffel Tower, a parachutist. a train upside down but

still insouciantly chuffing. It owes a lot to his friend Robert Delaunay, who

made abstractions of Paris windows. But the picture is plucked back from the

analytic by its delicious strain of fantasy: a cat with a man’s head serenading

on the sill, a Janus head (Chagall himself, looking forward to modernism and

back to the village?) displaying a heart on his hand. He was unquestionably a

prince of tropes. “With Chagall alone,” said Andre Breton, leader of the

surrealists, “metaphor made its triumphant entry into modern painting.” And

though the procession that followed its entry had its tedious stretches,

involving some fairly shameless plucking on the heart-strings, the best of

Chagall remains indispensable to any nondoctrinaire reading of the art of the

20th century.

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