|
War and Revolution in Russia
1914-1923
|
Self-Portrait
1922
|
"'Vitebsk is a world all of its own. a unique town,
an unhappy town, a boring town." Still, compared with what Chagall was
to experience in the years ahead, his adjective "boring" might be
better applied to Paris than to his home town. His stay in France was
marked by constant work and the uneventful social life of elite
Bohemian circles. His Paris work was inspired less by an attempt to
grasp the reality of the big city than by reflection on himself, a
quest for the sources of his own vitality. Now, war and revolution
were to determine Chagall's life - and his art. too - and were to
place him in situations of considerable existential trouble.
All pretentiousness has disappeared from the
self-portrait he painted shortly after his return. It is a
changed man the artist now shows us, compared to the similar version
done in 1909; sceptically, almost with a touch of mystery, he
peers out from the leaves of the plant, ready to hide behind them at
any moment. Here Chagall emphasizes the soft, feminine features of his
face. He has something of the little boy smearing rouge on his face
(as he used to like doing). No doubt this painting may have
corresponded to what his family expected to see, may have confirmed
the image of him that had remained with them. More than that, however,
the portrait documents Chagall's fear of conscription into the Czar's
army. Chagall vehemently avoids even the remotest suggestion of manly
strength, which might have made him the kind of wartime cannon fodder
that Jews had often been felt to be good enough for.
|
|
Self-Portrait
1914
|
|
And "woina" (war) is the sole word we can make out
on the front page of 'The Smolensk Newspaper' . The paper is on
the table between two men. whose conversation appears to deal
exclusively with the carnage ahead of Europe. The old Jew. resting his
chin thoughtfully in his cupped hands, is thinking of the compulsory
conscription Czarist regimes have been imposing on his people from
time immemorial. Nor is his vis-a-vis, whose suit and hat pronounce
him to be a bourgeois, at all enthusiastic either; he is seen mopping
his brow in distraction. Paul Cezanne's 'Card Players' influenced this
painting, but Chagall is in no mood for the harmless games depicted by the French
artist. What the painting expresses is trepidation and consternation.
|
"Down with Naturalism, Impressionism, and realistic
Cubism ... Let us indulge our own lunacy! What is needed is a
purifying bloodbath, a revolution in the depths and not on the
surface."
MARC CHAGALL
|
The Smolensk Newspaper
1914
|
|
|
He cannot bring himself to utter the
loud "hooray" which many of his fellow artists (such as Apollinaire) shouted as they went to war. "Did
you see the old man praying? That is him. It would be wonderful to be
able to work in peace like that. At times a figure stood before me, a
man so old and tragic that he already looked like an angel. But I
could not stand to be near him for longer than half an hour. He stank
too terribly." Affectionately, jokingly, and with the urbane
nonchalance of a man of the world. Chagall approached the small world
he had grown up in, and out of. Paintings like 'The Praying Jew (Rabbi
of Vitebsk)' or 'Feast Day (Rabbi with Lemon)'
readily rely on the immediate charm of the subjects and the timeless
dignity we sense in these old and superannuated servants of the faith.
Yet at the same time, it is plain that Chagall is critical of their
attachment to an idyll that the artist can no longer share. These
paintings are the icons of a latter time.
|
The Praying Jew (Rabbi of Vitebsk)
1914
|
Feast Day (Rabbi with Lemon)
1914
|
|
On 25th July, 1915, Chagall married Bella, whom for
many years he had loved at a long distance. There were problems
aplenty in the way of the couple, above all the grudges borne by
Bella's parents, who had hoped their son-in-law would be of a better
family. But their reservations were dispelled - at the latest, nine
months later (almost to a day), when little Ida was born. In times of
confusion, the young couple were in the seventh heaven, and 'The
Birthday' testifies to their happiness. Chagall has painted
the pattern on the sofa cushion with minute attention, and the
tablecloth too; in all things he is at pains to reproduce the
furnishings of the room exactly. The love this picture attests to has
a concrete setting and is no mere vision of the beloved (as used to be
the case in Paris), but really exists. "All I had to do was open my
window," writes Chagall, "and in streamed the blueness of the sky,
love and flowers with her. Dressed all in white or all in black, she
has been haunting my paintings, the great central
image of my art." With the energies of a poet, Chagall uses words such
as "flow", "haunt" or "hover" to give linguistic expression to the
exhilaration and happiness he felt with Bella. The dizzy freedom from
gravity we observe in the couple in the painting is. strictly
speaking, simply the visual transcript twin of metaphoric language, a
faithful reformulation of linguistic ideas into images in paint. The
label "poetry" has time and time again been attached to Marc Chagall's art, and
in this identification of written and visual language it proves apt.
|
The Birthday
1915
|
|
The painter and his bride dreamt of carefree
serenity in the country, and the picturesque idyll - lying back in the
grass - became real in a painting: 'The Poet Reclining' shows
the poet stretched full length, matching the lower edge of the
picture. Overhead, with nothing to decide whether we are seeing the
poet's vision or a real scene, we see an idyll of Nature: "Alone at
last in the country. Woods, pine trees, solitude. The moon behind the
wood. The pig in the sty, and through the window the horse in the
fields. The sky a lilac colour." Chagall recalls in My Life. As
in the case of the poet in the painting, the autobiography gives no
definite indication whether an actual experience is being described or
merely the picture. What gives enduring life to poetry, that highly
deliberate game played with unclarity and ambiguity, is precisely the
blurring of the fictive and the real such as Chagall offers
us here; and yet. however much they may toy with
poeticism. these paintings are nevertheless conjurations of a world
where all is well. They afford ways of escaping the tough reality of
the war years.
Soon, though, that reality overtook Chagall.
Military service proved unavoidable. To get out of being sent to the
front, and thus to certain injury of body and soul, Chagall took work
in his brother-in-law Jakov Rosenfeld's office in the capital, where
essential war work was being done, which rated as equivalent to
serving at the front. And so Chagall spent his days in St. Petersburg,
monotonously stamping papers, disinclined to paint.
|
|
The Poet Reclining
1915
|
|
In Paris, with its own tremendously active art
scene. Chagall had learnt little of Russia's remarkable artistic
evolution, of the avant-garde's progress from regional smallness to
larger international importance. In St. Petersburg he was now able to
engage in new developments. In 1912 he had participated in the group
show entitled Donkey's Tail, sending his painting 'The Dead
Man' from Paris; the aesthetics of that exhibition were not unlike his
own. In 1916 Chagall somewhat belatedly turned to the Primitivism then
being practised by Nathalie Gontcharova and Michael Larionov, and the
effect can be seen particularly clearly in 'The Feast of the
Tabernacles'. Figures of a deliberate awkwardness move across
a space, angular and as if they had been placed on a background they
had not the slightest connection with. As if seen with a child's
perspective, they are reduced to complete profiles or completely
frontal images: there arc no intermediate shades or nuances, since
this would not fit the robust simplicity of the scene. It is only in
his rendering of the summer house roof, with its vague gestures
towards Cubism, that Chagall demonstrates that the crude fashioning of
the picture is deliberate and not due to any lack of skill. Locked
away in the cramped and spartan confines of a war economy office, the
artist could not rise to that fleet-footed choreographic brush work
that distinguishes the paintings inspired by Bella. The
plain and pithy working of 'The Feast of the Tabernacles'
reflects
Chagall's emotional condition.
|
The Feast of the Tabernacles
1916
|
Bella
1925
|
Bella with White Collar
1917
|
|
|
|
An event was to follow which, according to Chagall,
was the most important in his life, and which was to keep the artist,
and many more besides, in suspense for years to come. At the heart of
the nation, in the capital, he watched the signals for struggle
against the hopelessly outdated Czarist regime grow into a revolution.
During the ten days that shook the world, St. Petersburg was in the
hands of the Reds. "Thus saith the Lord God: Behold. О my people. I
will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves,
and bring you into the land of Israel."' These words of the vision of
Ezekiel are inscribed in Hebrew-lettering above the 'Cemetery Gates' which Chagall painted at that very time. A mood of turbulent
change prevailed throughout the
nation, and thus Chagall's use of the Old Testament
prophecy for a present rejoicing in its future by no means seems
blasphemous. The Bolsheviks had taken Russia out of the war, and the
Jews at long last had equal citizens' rights with other Russians. The
early days of the Revolution were marked by untroubled optimism.
|
"In the mornings and evenings she would bring to ray
studio cakes she had baked with loving care, fried fish, boiled milk,
colourful fabrics, and even boards of wood to use as an easel. All I
had to do was open my window and in streamed the bluencss of the sky.
love and flowers with her. Dressed all in white or all in black, she
has long been haunting my paintings, the great central image of my
art."
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
|
Cemetery Gates
1917
|
|
Lenin appointed Anatoli Lunacharski head of his
Ministry of Culture. Chagall had known Lunacharski in Paris, where the
emigre was making his living as a journalist, writing for
Russianlanguage publications. In September 1918, this acquaintanceship
resulted in an official position for Chagall: he was made Fine Arts
Commissar in Vitebsk. Art was highly valued in the opening phase of
the Revolution, and it was hoped that aesthetics and politics would
inspire each other in their strivings for a more human future.
Communists saw both art and their conception of the state as being
opposed to bourgeois attitudes, as being interdependent, and (by
virtue of being progressive and avant-garde) as offering them the
chance of a better world. The old dream of art autonomously practised
for its own sake was to be replaced by an art engaged with reality.
Chagall, full of enthusiasm, plunged headlong into
his new position as a professional aesthetician; he organized
exhibitions, opened museums, and restarted classes at the Vitebsk
Academy of Art. And presently this confirmed individualist and
resolute advocate of the strange and unusual was to be found putting
the case for the power of anonymity and equality: "Believe me, the
working people, once they have been transformed, will be ready to
storm the heights of art and culture." Chagall was quite the
Communist, without reservation.
Marc and Bella Chagallwith their daughter Ida, Paris, 1924
Chagall planned to mark the first anniversary of the
Revolution with colourful celebratory decorations all over Vitebsk.
Although he largely kept to the decreed ideology in such works as 'War
on the Palaces', the reaction of orthodox comrades was unanimous: "Why
is the cow green and why is the horse flying in the sky?" they asked,
puzzled, according to Chagall. "What has it got to do with Marx and
Lenin?" The painter had scarcely begun to identify with his new cause
when he was confronted with bullheaded demands for the political
applicability of his art. 'The Painter: To the Moon',
dated 1917 by Chagall but very likely done no earlier than 1919. is
Chagall's response, and stubbornly insists on artistic inspiration.
The familiar figure of the painter reflectively lost in his dreams
hovers through the picture, removed from this world into a sphere of
imaginary and (as it were) heavenly rapture. His head is crowned with
laurels; this ages-old symbol of the poet's fame is meant as an
eloquent testimony to the painter's intention to create realities of
his own.
|
"Clad in a Russian smock, a leather briefcase under
my arm. I gave the perfect impression of a Soviet functionary."'
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
|
The Painter: To the Moon
1917
|
|
Not least because Vitebsk was largely spared the
terrible food shortages that soon ravaged the land, the Academy of
Art, under its director Chagall, soon had an impressive list of
famous teachers on its staff. One by one, the creme of the Russian
avant-garde moved to the provinces, and illustrious names such as El
Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich brought an air of Bohemianism to
Vitebsk. Soon, conflicts over the direction true art had to take began
to jeopardize Chagall's future. In 1915 Malevich had caused a
sensation with his "Black Square on a White Ground', and had become
established internationally as one of the leaders of the new art. The
cerebral equilibrium of abstract zones of colour which Malevich
advocated in the name of "pure painting", and his thesis that art should abandon all links
with given reality, were thorns in Chagall's flesh. While Chagall was
away on a trip to Moscow he was deposed by a palace revolution, and
the free academy was declared a Suprematist institute. True, Chagall
was restored to both his office and his esteem on his return; but he
had conceived a deep distrust of the Revolution and its notion of art.
In May 1920 Chagall quit Vitebsk, and moved with his family to Moscow.
Still, even he had not kept totally free of
Malevich's influence. 'Peasant Life', dated 1917 and in fact
done in 1919 in Vitebsk, clearly evidences a link with Malevich's programme with its
meditative balance of monochrome geometrical shapes. But Chagall has
peopled this abstract grid with his usual personnel and re-interpreted
the colour fields in terms of areas of real life; the man with the
whip and the woman with the animal occupy these zones in archetypal
confrontation. This peaceful geometrical order, which served Malevich
as a metaphor for the inner world of thought and feeling, is
transformed under Chagall's brush into a concrete basic idea, a core
repertoire of motifs for the execution of genre scenes.
|
|
|
Peasant Life (The Stable; Night; Man
with Whip)
1917
|
|
|
The family led their life in the new capital in
considerable poverty. Chagall was fond of the stage, and created
designs for Moscow's Jewish Theatre, but he earned only enough for the
bare essentials. He made monumental murals for the foyer and
auditorium, with allegorical images of aspects of theatre; 'Green
Violinist', painted in 1923/24, is a replica of the mural
depicting Music, and a faithful reduced-size version of an original in
the Moscow theatre.
The familiar figure of the fiddler has lost none of
its suggestive power for Chagall, and the image conjures forth another
realm at a time of deep depression.
|
|
|
Green Violinist
1923-1924
|
|
The support the state gave artists was scaled
according to the political usefulness of their works. Chagall was
placed very far down in the grant hierarchy, since none other than
Malevich was responsible for classifying artists, and Malevich had a
low opinion of his fellow artist. "I think the Revolution could be a
great thing if it retained its respect for what is other and
different," wrote Chagall in My Life, which he was completing
at the time. It was this respect, a respect for his own affection for
the unusual, that he felt a lack of in the new order; the totalitarian
tendency to steamroll everything level had left his appeals to the
power of fantasy unheeded. With neither money, success or prospects,
Chagall no longer had any reason to stay in the nation which was now
known as the Soviet Union. Lunacharski got the family a passport so
that they could leave.
Chagall now recollected Walden, the Berlin gallery
owner, and the success he had been denied for so many years. He
planned to pick up threads in Berlin and re-establish a secure
finanical footing for his career by selling paintings there; when he
arrived in the city in summer 1922, it turned out that his name did
indeed have some currency. Walden had sold the pictures Chagall had
left in Berlin and had paid the money into an account for the artist.
However, high inflation had now hit Germany and the money had become
valueless, so that Chagall found himself with neither pictures nor
funds. He went to court over the matter, and a few of the paintings,
hastily bought back, were restored to him by way of compensation. But
he literally had to start all over again.
|
|
 |
