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The Paris Years
1910-1914
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Self-Portrait
1910
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Russia's young up-and-coming artists were likelier
to be better received in Paris than in their own country. Sergei
Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, the entire troupe of dancers, musicians,
writers and painters, had scored a sensation there with their mixture
of sublimity and exoticism and had awakened longings for the vast
spaces of the East. Russia was "in". Alexei von Jawlensky, Vassili
Kandinsky, Jacques Lipchitz. and all the artists who were to achieve
worldwide fame, took advantage of the fashion to get to know modernism
at its place of birth. Bakst had arrived in 1909 to work with
Diaghilev. In 1910 Chagall too made the four-day rail trip in the
autumn, taking with him the spartan funds his St. Petersburg patron,
Max Winawer, allowed him and hopes of being supported by the numerous
Russians in Paris. He moved into his first studio on Montmartre, in a
fellow Russian's flat.
"All that prevented me from returning immediately
was the distance between Paris and my home town". Chagall writes in
his memoirs, still complaining about the upheaval which so unsettled
this country-born artist. Indeed, the young Chagall plunged into the
world of art, going the rounds of galleries to see the Impressionists
at Paul Durand-Ruel's, Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh at the Galerie
Bemheim (the first time he saw them in the original), and the
astonishing Matisse at the autumn salon. Above all, he discovered the
Old Masters: "The Louvre put an end to my uncertainty." In paintings
such as 'The Model", done soon after his arrival, we see
his new engagement with the French artistic tradition. Chagall's
palette, it is true, retains the earthy darkness of his Russian
pictures, but the thick application of the paint and the frayed,
fibrous juxtaposition of colourful brushstrokes reflect contemporary
colour theories. Chagall's subject is a studio scene, and thus a
meditation on his own work, but his model is holding a brush as well
and painting a picture herself, which metaphorically creates an
atmosphere of prevalent creativity, an artistic commitment that
reaches into all aspects of everyday life. "Starting with the market,
where I could only buy a piece of a cucumber since I had no money;
through the worker in his blue overalls, to the keenest disciples of
Cubism, everything testified to a definite sense of measure and
clarity, a precise sense of form," writes Chagall, describing this
creative flair. It was a flair he wanted to appropriate in his own
work.
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"At
that time I had grasped that I had to go to Paris. The soil that had
nourished the roots of my art was Vitebsk; but my art needed Paris as
much as a tree needs water. I had no other reason for leaving my
homeland, and I believe that in my paintings I have always remained
true to it."
MARC CHAGALL
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The Model
1910
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The artist did all that was in his power to promote
the legend of his own poverty. Not only the cucumber he could only
afford a piece of, not only the herring whose head he ate one day and
tail the next, but even the very paintings he did in this early Paris
period remind us of how poor Chagall was. Many of them are painted on
canvas that had already been painted on and Chagall proved skillful at
manipulating contrasts of light and dark, inherited through this
re-use, for his own purposes of lighting. While the re-use of old
canvases was good for demonstrating financial difficulties, in time it
also became an expressive medium in its own right, and indeed a
characteristic aesthetic procedure of the Cubists.
'Interior II', painted in 1911, shows
us Chagall's first tentative ventures into Cubism. The Cubist idiom is
seen in the angular shapes that mark the woman's skirt and the table
edge, but beyond this seemingly abstract centre the picture also has a
narrative content. In wild abandon, a woman is failing upon a bearded
man and dragging a goat behind her. The man, who makes a fearful and
defensive impression, cowering in his chair, is fending her off by
grasping her thigh. The man's distress and the woman's wrathful
instinctuality are conveyed by means of a centuries-old compositional
trick by which, as in the reading process, we are made to interpret
the dynamics of motion along a line from left to right.
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Interior II
1911
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In 'To my Betrothed',
painted at the same time, Chagall evolved a more contemporary approach
to the same subject, though in the treatment of sexuality this
painting is once again archetypal. Here, the full vitality of the
subject is developed (albeit the compositional structure is
distinguished by its total tranquillity within the terms of the visual
medium): the woman twines about the shoulders of the bull-headed man
like a snake, spitting into his face, while the man, with every
appearance of calmness, grasps at her leg with a gesture that suggests
desire rather than defence. The tale and its symbolic content are
inseparable. They have become this way not only through the unity of
human and animal, but particularly through the woman's radial
movement, a demonstration of power which seems impossible for the man
to escape from. If 'Interior II' could still be viewed
as a harmless genre scene, that was no longer feasible now. Indeed, it
was only after protracted argument that Chagall was allowed to exhibit
this painting at the 1912 spring salon at all. He was accused of
painting pornography. What gave this picture its bold suggestiveness
was the simple compositional variation of arranging the motifs in
circular form about a centre rather than stringing them in one linear
direction. It was a procedure Chagall had learnt from Cubism. In fact,
Cubism was to solve many of Chagall's early technical problems.
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"In
Paris I went to neither the art academy nor to the professors. The
city itself was my teacher, in all things, every minute of the day.
The market folk, the waiters, the hotel porters, the farmers, the
workers. They were enveloped in something of that astounding
atmosphere of enlightened freedom (lumiere-libcrte)
that I had never come across anywhere else."
MARC CHAGALL
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To my Betrothed
1911
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Self-Portrait with Goat
1922
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Chagall's link with Cubism was forged not so much by
Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque, the movement's founding fathers, as
by Robert Delaunay. who was married to the Russian painter Sonia Terk.
The orthodox Cubists' coolly dissecting gaze was not the way Chagall
and Delaunay looked at things, nor were they interested in the
solitary dignity of concrete objects, which enabled the Cubists to
make even painted canvas their subject. And the dichotomy of
abstraction and representation, Braque's and Picasso's integral method
by which ordinary scrutiny of a thing would be amplified by everyday
available knowledge of its uses, was of secondary importance to them
too. For Delaunay, and especially for Chagall, Cubism represented an
artistic language for the expression of the world's magic, the secret
life of things, beyond mere functionality. It provided them with
geometrical patterns, models for ordering dreams, experiences, desires
and visions, ways of re-creating them in terms of a visual logic that
could be grasped by others. Imagined realities were complicated
enough, and needed an appropriate medium; and the Russian's visions,
jostling for expression in his Paris years, found their needs answered
to by the complexity of Cubist forms.
Near the Paris abattoirs there was an artists'
colony known as 'La Ruche' (the beehive) from the shape of its central
building, a do-decagonal wooden pavilion. This was one of the places
that gave Paris its reputation as an art metropolis; painters and
sculptors from all over the world gathered there in quest of
international careers. There were nearly 140 studios there,
rudimentary and dirty, but cheap; and in the winter of 1911/1912
Chagall moved into one of them. His neighbours included a number of
Russians, among them Chaim Soutine, a wilful and grouchy eccentric, an
Eastern Jew like Chagall. With the move, a change occurred in the
format of Chagall's works; he now had more space than in his little
quarters in Montmartre and was able to paint on bigger canvases. Many
of the pictures he did at 'La Ruche' bear the date 1911, but in fact
the artist did not date them immediately on completion, and when he
did so later, looking back, he rather mixed up the chronological order
of his works. For his own purposes, he grouped his oeuvre into cycles
which he then dated according to the promptings of some inner
time-schedule which had little to do with the realities of the
calendar. This may seem a trivial point, but here, too, Chagall proves
a master of ironic deception, affecting to despise conventions of
orderliness and only conceding allegiance to a clownish inner world of
his own.
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Reclining Nude
1911
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"There
in the Louvre, looking at paintings by Manet, Millet and others. I realised why
my links to Russia and Russian art were so slack, why I did not even speak their
language."
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
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'I and the Village' is dated
1911 but was painted at 'La Ruche'; it is Chagall's definitive
programmatic painting of the Paris years. The radial, centrifugal
structure of the picture has here become the major compositional
principle. Chagall starts out from Delaunay's use of sectional, sliced
images - with the analogy of circle and sun as a figurative element in
what is an otherwise abstract configuration of colour - and goes on to
achieve a pictorial unity through the yoking of motifs taken from
different realms of given reality. The four sections of the work are
dominated by archetypal human and animal figures as well as Nature (in
the form of a twig) and Civilisation (the village). Narration and plot
are no longer needed; the geometrical arrangement, criss-crossing the
picture with diagonals and arcs, suffices to give order to the
subject. Two of Cubism's most electrifying devices, the juxtaposition
of motifs and a certain transparency in the forms, are tested here for
their ability to realise images from memory as well as visions and
fragments of the most diverse kinds of reality in a painting. The head
of the lamb, its contours creating the space for the milking scene,
houses and people standing on their heads, and proportions contrary to
all experience are arranged on associative lines and stand for a
reality beyond the visible world, for an imaginative realm in which
memories become symbols. For, indeed, all of the details in 'I and the
Village' are taken from memory. The artist has availed himself of
Cubism, which places so strong an emphasis on concrete appearance, in
order to create an autonomous world dependent on nothing but his own
psychology. "Once in Paris I was finally able to express the (somehow)
culinary joy I had sometimes felt in Russia - the joy of my childhood
memories of Vitebsk," writes Chagall. Not until he was in Paris did he
find the means to open up his own inner world, his feelings of
happiness, his longing for the little realm of his childhood.
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I and the Village
1911
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The title 'I and the Village' is notable for its
imaginative succinctness, at odds (as it were) with the interplay of
ambiguities in the painted scene. Like 'To my Betrothed' or
'To Russia, with Asses and Others' the title was thought out
by Blaise Cendrars, Chagall's most important companion during the
Paris years. Compared to the distinctly rigorous intellectuality of
his fellow painters, the evocative staccato of images and the anarchic
merriness of the linguistic coinages in Cendrars's poems and novels
represented a counterpart to Chagall's associative world of wonders.
The people who supported Chagall in his chosen approach, sharing his
taste for poetry and likewise questing for the hidden significance of
things, were literary people. "A genius, as split as a peach,"
Cendrars said of his friend. Chagall riposted with 'Half Past Three
(The Poet)'. The poet is seen sitting alone at a table. Coffee cup in hand, a
tempting bottle of brandy at his side, he seems to be in the throes of
poetic inspiration. At all events he inhabits some imaginary,
super-natural world; his head, his spirit, free of the body, even
beyond the grid of diagonals that the world of images is contained in.
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To Russia, with Asses and Others
1911
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Half Past Three (The Poet)
1911
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"But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I
thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my
pictures."
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
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This homage to coffee house literati shows Chagall
already in the process of moving on beyond Cubism and the geometrical
manner. The interwoven lines had previously merely served to achieve a
sense of order; now they appear as an integral part of the painting's
statement, enveloping the figure of the poet and, by emphasizing the
freedom of the head, underlining the independence of the power of
inspiration. Chagall was out to appropriate the imaginative strength
of the poet and his independence of the principle of order. His
geometrical structures abruptly became metaphors, the major bearers of
poetic meaning.
Guillaume Apollinaire called Chagall's pictorial
worlds "surna-turel"; later he was to call them '"surreal". This
concept, as Surrealism, was to give a name to an era. The inventor of
the term, Apollinaire, was not so much Chagall's friend as his mentor,
and tirelessly tried to organize exhibition space for him. Chagall
paid his thanks to him too, in 'Homage to Apollinaire'; though
perhaps in this painting the artist somewhat too ambitiously plays
with the aura of the mysterious stranger that Apollinaire had seen him
as. At the centre of the composition (the circular shape matches the
hint of a numbered dial) we see Adam and Eve with the apple, the two
figures represented as one. Alongside this hermaphroditic myth there
is a dedicatory inscription with the names of friends and linguistic
symbols of the four elements. Chagall's own signature also appears in
cryptic form, stripped of vowels and with a cabbalistic air. This
rather mysterious mixture of various secret doctrines no doubt
satisfied Chagall's wish for an art that would draw upon many
cultures; but it can communicate only with the help of words, and in
that respect its method is closer to poetry than to painting.
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Homage to Apollinaire
1912
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MARC CHAGALL
"He is asleep
Now he is awake
And suddenly he is painting
He reaches for a church paints with a church
He reaches for a cow and paints with a cow
With a sardine
With skulls hands knives
Paints with the nerves of an ox
All the besmirched sufferings of little Jewish towns
Tormented by burning love from the depth
of Russia
For France
Death heart and desires
He paints with his thighs
Has his eyes in his behind
There it is Your face
It is You dear reader I
t is I
It is he
His own betrothed
The grocer on the corner
The milkmaid
Midwife
New-born babies are being washed in
buckets of blood
Heavenly madness
Mouths gush forth fashions
The Eiffel Tower is like a corkscrew
Hands heaped on each other
Christ
He himself Jesus Christ
He lived a long youth on the cross
Every new day another suicide
And suddenly he is no longer painting
He was awake
Now he is asleep
Strangles himself with a tie
Chagall astonished Borne on by immortality"
BLAISE CENDRARS
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"I remember Apollinaire's first
visit to my studio in La 'Ruche' in 1912. Confronted with the pictures
I had painted between 1908 and 1912, he used the word 'Surnaturalisme'.
I had no way of guessing that 15 years later the surrealist movement
would be coming along."
MARC CHAGALL
Guillaume Apollinaire
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"I do not personally believe that scientific aims
serve the cause of art well. Impressionism and Cubism are alien to me.
It seems to me that art is first and foremost a condition of the
soul.'" Chagall's works increasingly reflected this unease concerning
the neutral beauty of the visible world (here expressed to Apollinaire)
and his rejection of "an era that sings hymns to technology and
deifies Progress". Paintings such as 'Adam and Eve', dated
1912, which still - with their dissectional analysis of form - owe
everything to a sense of the intrinsic dynamics of shapes in art.
prove typical for only a short period in Chagall's work. Soon his gaze
returned in childishly naive manner to the magic of the world and he
resumed his adventurous quest for the secrets told by things. The
childhood experiences Chagall retells in his visual world are presented within the traditions of
his origins as well as the anti-rational patterns of Russian thought
and the strict veto on images that marked Jewish life. To this extent,
Chagall's settings are never separable from a mystical, conceptual
world where his motifs are transmuted into symbols that stand for some
invisible reality.
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Adam and Eve
1912
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The Man with the Pig
1923 |
The second version of 'Birth', dated 1912, indeed
reveals a far freer sense of access to the mysteries of Nature. The stiff pathos of the earlier version, where Chagall's desire
for an artistic image impaired the expressive potential of the work,
has gone, to be replaced by a cheerful acceptance of the story-telling
urge. The young mother is still lying on her bloodstained sheets, but
now she is surrounded by busy and colourful vitality: two women are
conducting an excited conversation, others have nodded off at the
stove, and to the right of the picture people are waiting to begin
celebrating the happy event in a fit manner. The dynamics of visual
shapes, introduced into Chagall's work by his borrowings from Cubism,
adds a certain liveliness to the pictorial narrative. At last the
childhood experiences which Chagall always made use of in his work
have that vibrancy and charming vitality which, quite apart from any
symbolic values, renders them accessible in the simplest of ways as an
account of life. The poet's head askew on his shoulders and the
soldier, holding his finger under the samovartap and saluting, while
his cap raises itself (as in 'The Soldier drinks'), are often
to be seen in this period of his oeuvre. The chatty tone is typical of
Chagall.
As in the work of his great contemporary, Picasso,
there are analytic and synthetic phases in alternation in Chagall's
art. In the early Paris period, influenced by the analogous methods
being applied by Cubism, Chagall explored his experiences through the
interaction of motifs; he juxtaposed impressions and memories, linking
them only by means of an abstract structure unifying the whole canvas
space. Later in Paris he increasingly paid attention to the scene that
dominated an entire picture, intensifying thought into one single
moment where time appears to stand still. "Even as I was taking part
in that unique upheaval in artistic techniques in France, in my own
thoughts, in my soul as it were, I returned to my own country. I lived
with my back turned to what was in front of me." Thus the artist
described his focus on the past, writing in 1960; that return to the
past was also a withdrawal from the art scene of the avant-garde,
which equated artistic progress with novelty and with originality of
language, both spoken or written.
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Birth
1912
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The Soldier drinks
1912
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'The Cattle Dealer', dated 1912 but (like so
many of Chagall's paintings) probably done later, reproduces instead
the harmonious simplicity of peasant life. Metaphors of security and
well-being dominate this rural scene: the unborn foal in the mare's
belly, the lamb on the woman's shoulders (alluding to the Christian
image of the Good Shepherd), the bridge across which the cart is
quietly rolling. The relaxed overall impression, created by the
compositional sequence of horizontals and verticals, might lead us to
forget that these animals also mean the money deals of the market
place; perhaps they are on their way to be slaughtered. Recollections
of his homeland gave Chagall' sportrayal something of the harmless prettiness of
genre painting. 'The Pinch of Snuff' pays still more striking
homage to the homeland. The imperious figure of the bearded, sidelocked Jew. with phylactery and Star of David in the background
and the book with Hebrew characters, call up a familiar image, while
the colours give it the defamiliarized appearance of a vision. It is caught
between near and far, everyday and exotic, and testifies eloquently to
the artist's homesickness. The book's Hebrew lettering includes the
name "Segal Mosche", the artist's own name in his home country, a name
which he had internationalized, for the sake of convenience, into
"Marc Chagall" when still in Russia. His wish to see the homeland once
more was growing ever stronger.
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The Cattle Deale
1912
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The Pinch of Snuff
1912
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In spring 1914 he got his chance. At Apollinaire's
suggestion, Herwarth Walden, mentor of the Expressionists and editor
of Der Sturm, Germany's most significant avant-garde art
periodical, arranged Chagall's first major solo exhibition at his
Berlin gallery. Though he had sold a few graphic works, Chagall had
been doing bad business in Paris; the famous dealer's offer seemed
tantamount to an international breakthrough. The irony of fate and
politics decreed, however, that Chagall was to see none of the
proceeds from these pictures. The outbreak of the First World War put
his career back by years. "My paintings were showing off in the
Potsdamer Strasse," Chagall recalled, "while nearby the cannons were
being loaded." Nonetheless, on 13 th June, 1914, he travelled to
Russia on a visitor's visa, which was valid for three months, to
attend his sister's wedding, revive memories and see Bella again. Soon
frontiers were closed, and a stay he had meant to last weeks became one of eight years. Chagall had
returned to the scene of almost all his paintings. 'The Fiddler' is one of his last Paris works. The earlier version
, dated 1912/1913, allows the tablecloth it is painted on to show
through, and in this, and in the use of mutually contradictory
proportions, is squarely within the Cubist ambit; in the later
version, by contrast, a twisty track curves through the canvas,
lending the scene spatial and dramatic unity. The red-clad fiddler,
with the beggar lad behind him. waiting for a contribution, is the
dominant figure. Traditionally he leads Jewish wedding processions:
we can therefore see the two people in the background as a newly-wed
couple. The weighty equilibrium is scarcely disturbed any more by
grotesqueness, and only the use of colour preserves those elements of
the imagination which (of course) these pictures, painted in the great
Western metropolis, in fact represent. 'The Fiddler' tends to obscure
its own artifice and affects a verisimilitude of the portrayed
elements, despite the fact that they were not painted from life.
Whatever the case, the painting includes expressive approaches which
Chagall, the motifs now immediately before him in Russia, would be
able to re-use unchanged.
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The Fiddler
1911-1914
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The Fiddler
1912-1913
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