|
France and America
1923-1948
|
The Walk
1922
|
Chagall's memoirs in My Life, finished in
1922, make best sense read with the upheaval and removal from Moscow
to Paris in mind. Not yet forty, the artist took an autobiographical
retrospective look at a past which had been far from uneventful and
tried to draw up a balance sheet on his own life. The gentle irony
which turns the autonomous world of his paintings into the diarylike
impressions of childhood is also to be found in these recollections.
His art was lost in the gutters of the market, but his recollections
were still all there.
The book was meant to be published by Paul Cassirer
in Berlin and was also intended to serve as a sign of life for his old
friends in France. But for the time being only a portfolio of twenty
etchings (Chagall's illustrations to the text) was produced; the book
edition was not published until 1931 in Paris, Bella having translated
it from Russian into French. Still, the great Parisian dealer Ambroise
Vollard, mentor of the Cubists and a friendly father-figure to Picasso
in particular, commissioned Chagall to illustrate Nikolai Gogol's
Dead Souls, and on 1st September, 1923, Chagall left for Paris and
a new artistic career.
"What I first set eyes on was a trough. Simple,
massive, semi-hollow, semi-oval. A junkshop trough. Once I got in, I
filled it completely." These are the opening words of My Life.
'The Watering Trough' recalls the memoirs' opening and
emblematically emphasizes Chagall's continuing ties to past times he
could not break loose from. Perhaps working on the book by his fellow
countryman, Gogol revived his recollections of Russia; at any rate, as
his fame increased, this kind of subject matter came to be his
trademark, with Chagall was not so much focussing attention on the
world of the shtetl as quoting himself. The woman and the pig
are both bending over the trough in unison. They have the same long
backs, their heads are in the same profile position, they both need
water: tongue-in-cheek, the artist is pointing out the affinity of
human and animal. The scene has its own unity, and in its absurdity
has the flavour of the earlier genre scenes observed from further
away; the fine, subtle colouring, with its unmistakably French character, contributes to this unity.
There are two versions of this painting, their colour schemes quite
distinct. A typically Western feeling for the emotive qualities of
colouring is superimposed atmospherically onto the earthy subject
matter drawn from Chagall's homeland. It was a strategy Chagall was to perfect
in the years ahead. In the early phase of this new Paris period,
Chagall was especially fond of making two versions of a painting, as
if by creating it in duplicate he could guarantee his own existence
against the predatory machinations of the market. He also set about re-doing
some of the paintings that had gone missing, using reproductions or
working from memory. What prompted him to these repetitive labours may
have been not only the wish to repair the ravages of war and make good
the loss to his art, but also a sense that, with the paintings, a part
of himself had been lost.
|
|
|
Golda
Meier and Marc Chagall
|
|
|
This is by no means an inflated stylization of
himself. Rather, it reflects a profound faith in the power of images,
a faith that had led the Jews to veto image-making, particularly
religious ones. A veto and a cult are two sides of the same coin:
Chagall the Jew proves in this to be deeply rooted in his people's
traditions. The ancient magic power of pictures, which Chagall liked
to describe with the untranslatable word "chimie", lives on in the
artist's refusal to make saleable objects of his works. He could adapt
to his audience's wishes and needs in a way most of his fellow artists
were unable to do, but it was an adaptability that respected the
autonomous authority of the finished painting.
|
"I came to Palestine to examine certain ideas, and I
came without a camera, without even a brush. No documentation, no
tourist impressions, and nevertheless I am glad to have been there.
From far and wide they pour towards the Wailing Wall, bearded Jews in
yellow, blue and red robes and with fur caps. Nowhere else do you see
so much despair and so much joy; nowhere else are you so shaken and
yet so happy as at the sight of this thousand-year-old heap of stones
and dust in Jerusalem, in Sefad, in the hills where prophets upon
prophets lie buried."
MARC CHAGALL
"If in some painting I have cut
off the head of a cow and replaced it upside down or have sometimes
even painted the whole picture topsy-turvy, the reason was not that I
wanted to create literature. I am out to introduce a psychic shock
into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning:
that is to say, a fourth dimension. An example: a street. Matisse
constructs it in the spirit of Cezanne. Picasso in that of Negroes or
Egyptians. I go about it differently. 1 have my street. In that street
1 place a corpse. The corpse causes psychic confusion in the street. I
put a musician on a rooftop. The presence of the musician interacts
with that of the corpse. Then a man sweeping the street. The image of
the street-sweeper affects that of the musician. A bouquet of flowers
failing down, and so forth. In this way I admit a psychic fourth
dimension into pictorial representation and the two are mingled."
MARC CHAGALL
|
The Watering Trough
1925
|
The subject matter of 'I and the Village',
one of the paintings Chagall made a second copy of, re-appears in the
1925 work 'Peasant Life'. Once again we see archetypal figures
which personify a quality of simplicity in a visionary setting: human
and animal figures, and a sense of idyllic security, constitute the
genre's sine qua поп. However, the geometrical grid that made
the juxtapositions in the earlier painting possible has now been
replaced, in compositional terms, by a principle of free association.
The man feeding the horse, whose profile is the base of the house, now
have a complementary rather than contrastive effect.
What inspired this painting was not so much rustic
life in Russia (which Chagall, after the things he had experienced
during the Revolution, was less prepared to glamourize than he had
been previously) as an image Chagall had of himself. The atmospheric
content of the colour scheme, and the relaxation of the strict grid,
are a commentary on his own early period, viewed from the vantage
point of the latest aesthetic trends. Surrealism had replaced Cubism,
and Chagall felt an affinity through the liberation from self-imposed
patterns of order and the reckless espousal of the kind of disorder
that is typical of dreams.
Marc Chagall, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1956
"Chagall, and only Chagall, provided painting with
the triumphant advent of metaphor." Thus Andre Breton, singing
Chagall's praises, and eulogizing his poetic qualities, as late as
1945. Nevertheless, Chagall's relationship to the Surrealists was
torn, whatever their theoretician-in-chief might say. Long before
them, impelled by the elemental power of his homeland's folk art, he
had discovered the significance of dreams, visions and the nonrational
for his own work. The Surrealists, whose antirational approach to art
drew upon similar sources, repeatedly tried to win Chagall over, but
Chagall saw their homage to the power of the unconscious as a way of
pandering to the currents of taste and a wilful parade of illogicality, and was unable
to identify with them. His artistic credo came straight from the
heart: "The entire world within us is reality, perhaps more real than
the visible world. If one calls everything that seems illogical
fantasy or a fairy tale, all one proves is that one has not understood
Nature." To be attached to one's dreams and yet to advocate reality
constituted no contradiction in Chagall's eyes.
|
|
Peasant Life
1925
|
"I lived and worked in America during a period of
global tragedy that hit people everywhere. As the years passed by, 1
did not grow any younger. But in the atmosphere of hospitable welcome
I was able to draw strength. Without denying the roots of my art."
MARC CHAGALL
|
The family lived in the Avenue d'Orleans, in the
apartment where Lenin had stayed before them. The rooms, crammed with
the magic of oriental decor, were an oasis of the exotic in the cool
atmosphere of the big city. They were dominated by carpets and
cushions, and the ambience matched Chagall's public image; the aura of
the unfamiliar and mysterious which his pictorial images evoked
increasingly extended to the artist himself, and became a means of
publicizing himself which came to accompany every step in his career.
In 1924 the first Chagall retrospective was seen in
Paris, and in 1926 he had his first New York exhibition. From the
mid-1920s, at the latest, the provincial Russian's visions had become
public property; and both in his life-style and in his work, subtle
changes in the direction of his wider audience's taste began to become
apparent.
In 'The Three Acrobats' the central figure
leaps forward, with a final athletic motion, to receive applause and
bouquets at the edge of the stage. Chagall had always loved the dreamy
world of the circus and had been enthralled by the blend of dance,
theatre, music and language. This painting (done in 1926) is the
earliest of Chagall's works with the circus as subject. It took him a
relatively long time to express in paint a subject he had long been
inclined towards and the explanation may lie in the pressure he was
now under to adapt. For the first time he now seemed willing to apply
his visionary visual terms to a realm of experience where a visionary
quality was natural and, in any case, characteristic. The magic of the
motif and that of the artistic strategy now met, and threatened to
cancel each other out. Where Picasso had mercilessly confronted his
tumblers and harlequins with reality, Chagall's pictures of acrobats
have problems with tautology.
Not only the subject but also the clarity and
near-classical coolness of the presentation remind of us of the great
Spanish painter. The framing of the central figure by the smaller
flanking ones, the echoing of this triangular composition by the
canopy-like curtain, the robust physicality of the figures (with an
effect like statues), create an almost academic repose which reflects
a centuries-old code of beauty. The figurative emphasis is now on
artistic virtuosity as assessed by the touchstone of pictorial
tradition; the chaos of visions clamouring for expression has been
ousted in favour of the timeless norm of classic simplicity. The
painting has all the atmosphere characteristic of Chagall's work, but also a highly elaborate, even overdone
touch of the Old Masters.
|
|
Three Acrobats
1926 |
The Three Acrobats
1926
|
"If in some painting I have cut off the head of a
cow and replaced it upside down or have sometimes even painted the
whole picture topsy-turvy, the reason was not that I wanted to create
literature. I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting,
one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a
fourth dimension. An example: a street. Matisse constructs it in the
spirit of Cezanne. Picasso in that of Negroes or Egyptians. I go about
it differently. I have my street. In that street 1 place a corpse. The
corpse causes psychic confusion in the street. I put a musician on a
rooftop. The presence of the musician interacts with that of the
corpse. Then a man sweeping the street. The image of the
street-sweeper affects that of the musician. A bouquet of flowers
failing down, and so forth. In this way I admit a psychic fourth
dimension into pictorial representation and the two are mingled."
MARC CHAGALL
|
The Acrobats
1930
|
The Cock and the Pearl
1927
|
In his biography of Chagall, Franz Meyer quotes an
aphorism that sums up the two artists: "Picasso stood for the triumph
of the intellect, Chagall for the glory of the heart." The two now
established a relaxed friendship.
The dreamy elegance of the loving couple in
'The Rooster', where the monumental bird has replaced the lover,
belongs in that twilit world that can be grasped only in terms of mood
and emotion. The bliss these two are enjoying is shared by two other
couples, who are secluded in the background of the painting and in the
security of their affections.
The love poetry written by Chagall in such works,
and the tender elation (which matched his own emotional situation),
peaks in 'Lovers in the Lilacs', painted in 1930. The couple,
idyllically bedded down in a giant bouquet, are wholly immersed in the
timelessness of love. Following an ages-old pictorial code, Chagall
has here incorporated two of his central motifs: an icon showing the
Madonna Platytera was his inspiration, a representation of the
pregnant Virgin Mary with the child painted on her belly for clarity's
sake. In painting the mare with the foal in her womb (cf.'The Cattle
Dealer') Chagall had already echoed this treatment: now he
abstracted it into an explanation of the symbolic dimension that was
always in his motifs. Without doubt, this approach simplified the
business of decoding his pictorial messages, and helped Chagall to the
popularity his work enjoyed at the time, but at the same time the wish
to be comprehensible lent the paintings a touch of Romanticism that
seemed somewhat out-of-date.
Yet, that first decade in Paris, as the artist tells
us, was "the happiest time of my life". A contract with the art dealer
Bernheim removed his financial worries, the family was able to move
into a villa, and soon they were taking their summer holidays in the
south of France for granted. This more lavish way of life, this
private happiness, was accompanied by a compulsive turn to the opulent
in Chagall's work: the carefree naivety of the pictures reflects the
painter's own untroubled existence, and the magical atmosphere
replaces that liveliness of subject matter which requires an eventful
reality as a corrective.
|
The Rooster
1929
|
Lovers in the
Lilacs
1930
|
"If ever there was a moral crisis it was that of
paint, matter, blood, and all their constituents, the words and the
tones, all the things one makes a work of art out of. just as one
makes a life. For even if you cover a canvas with thick masses of
paint, irrespective of whether the outlines of shapes can be made out
or not, and even if you enlist the help of words and tones, it does
not necessarily follow that an authentic work of art will have been
created."
MARC CHAGALL
|
His mood, however, was shortly to darken. In a 1933
painting entitled 'Solitude', the merry dance of loving
couples is ousted by profound melancholy. Lost in contemplation,
cloaked in his tallith, a full-bearded Jew of indeterminate age is
sitting in the grass, the scrolls of the Torah unopened in his left
hand: the religious tradition of his forefathers affords no balm for
his misery, it seems. The sad-eyed cow lying beside him recalls the
words of the prophet Hosea: "For Israel slideth back as a
back-sliding heifer." (Hosea 4,16.) These figures symbolize the people of the Jewish diaspora, Chagall's
people (as the Russian surroundings imply). The picturesque old man
can be seen as Ahasverus, the eternal Wandering Jew, roaming the world
in uncertainty as to his future. On the horizon, beyond a countryside
which is on the whole seen with tender affection, storm clouds are
gathering, and their blackness is threatening the angel in the sky.
In 1931 Chagall had visited Palestine, the Promised
Land, but in his pictures the result of his travels appears as
anything but optimism. Alert to the world he lived in, Chagall
recorded notes of discord and unease: the year that saw the barbaric
ideology of National Socialism triumphant in Germany also saw repose
driven out of Chagall's paintings by a real world of harsh power.
In 'Solitude', Chagall was still using motifs that
were very much his own to indicate dangers that were menacing himself,
his people, and all of Europe. It was not the narrative content of the
painting, but its atmosphere that conveyed his newly gloomy view of
the world; in this respect, it resembled the mood paintings of the
1920s. Another journey, to Poland in spring 1935, finally convinced
Chagall that a new political reality had come to the fore which his
own world of images could no longer ignore: he was deeply affected by
what he saw in the Warsaw ghetto, and was present when his friend Dubnow was called a "dirty Jew" in the street. The world of the Jews
was no longer a dreamy, cosy sanctum of timeless contentment, but was
instead being perverted into a scene of rabid pogroms and racist
obsession. And the presence of this existential threat restored the
authentic power to Chagall's work.
|
|
Solitude
1933-1934
|
"I came to Palestine to examine certain ideas, and I
came without a camera, without even a brush. No documentation, no
tourist impressions, and nevertheless 1 am glad to have been there.
From far and wide they pour towards the Wailing Wall, bearded Jews in
yellow, blue and red robes and with fur caps. Nowhere else do you see
so much despair and so much joy; nowhere else are you so shaken and
yet so happy as at the sight of this thousand-year-old heap of stones
and dust in Jerusalem, in Sef'ad, in the hills where prophets upon
prophets lie buried."
MARC CHAGALL
|
Fascist assaults on the very core of human morality
had been answered by Picasso in what ranks as the finest product of
committed historical art in the twentieth century. His 'Guernica' (Museo
del Prado, Madrid) expressed the full depth of protest that
civilization was compelled to make when confronted with political
cynicism, and in 1937 the painting was (sadly enough) a major
attraction at the World Exhibition in Paris. That same year, Chagall
documented his own commitment in 'The Revolution', an elegiac
work to match the Spanish artist's direct accusation. Chagall's
painting is not a response to a specific event, but an attempt to
articulate political disquiet and unease in his own terms. Two ways of
grasping or shaping the world are juxtaposed in antithesis. To the
left, revolutionaries are seen rushing the barricades, their red flags
proudly proclaiming the victory of Communism. To the right, this image
of unity, standing for political demands for equality, is
counterbalanced by the free play of the human imagination. We see
musicians, clowns and animals playing, the customary loving couple are
lolling on the roof of a wooden hut, and in typical Chagall style, the
force of gravity has been suspended so that the ubiquitous energies
may develop freely. The figure of Lenin links the two zones; balanced acrobatically on one hand,
he is showing the revolutionaries the true way to a world of
individuality.
"I think the Revolution could be a great thing if it
retained its respect for what is other and different." Chagall had
written, summing up his Russian experiences in the light of his view
of himself as artist. The creative power of the individual is the
driving force in the struggle for political liberty. But the old Jew
in 'Solitude' still sits thinking about his own future and that of his
people ...
The painting is vehemently programmatic, and
overloaded with significance, so that its capacity for atmosphere and
mood has been lost. Its ambitious attempt to find a general,
supraindividual relevance and its unsatisfying treatment of the
technical problems remind us of Chagall's zeal in his early works: the
juxtaposition of archetypes, of symbolically laden shorthand images of
the world, is not equal to the task of rendering the complexity of
events. Nor was Chagall himself ever satisfied with this answer to
Picasso's great masterpiece. In 1943 he was to redo the large-format
version of 'The Revolution' in three panels, blending the political
and religious symbolism in the form of a triptych. The smaller version
reproduced here was preserved to testify to the artist's direct
involvement with world events (quite distinct from the wish to create
timeless works of art).
|
The Revolution
1937
|
The Crucifixion
1952
|
The second programmatic painting of this period,
'White Crucifixion', was done in 1938 and solves the problem
better. In 1933, Chagall had described his aesthetic aims in these
words: "If a painter is a Jew and paints life, how is he to keep
Jewish elements out of his work! But if he is a good painter, his
painting will contain a great deal more. The Jewish content will be
there, of course, but his art will aim at universal relevance." In the
figure of Christ on the cross, symbolizing the passion of the prophet
of the Jews and the death of the Christian God who took on the form of
a man, Chagall located a universal emblem for the sufferings of this
time. Like the arma Christ;, or the tools and implements shown
in traditional crucifixion scenes, images of confusion are grouped
about the cross. Revolutionary hordes with red flags rampage through a
village, looting and burning houses. Refugees in a boat shout for help
and gesticulate wildly. A man in Nazi uniform is desecrating a
synagogue. Distressed figures in the foreground are trying to escape.
Ahasverus, the Wandering Jew, is passing by in silence, stepping over
a burning Torah scroll. Old Testament figures are seen hovering,
lamenting against the background of desolate darkness. Still, a bright
beam of light breaks in from on high, illuminating the white and
unblemished figure on the cross. All trace of his suffering is gone,
and worship of his centuries-old authority is seen as a path of hope
amid the traumatic events of the present day. Belief in him, so
Chagall says, can move the mountains of despair.
Even the gentlest of irony has been eliminated from
this picture. Naked existential fear is seen appealing pathetically to
the saving power of religion in awaythat is unique in Chagall's work.
In this painting, and perhaps nowhere else, Chagall's recourse to the
traditional repertoire of tricks is quite free of willful cleverness,
and in its very use of scenes of the times, the picture becomes an
integrated whole and achieves the timeless depth of an icon. "It is
not right to paint pictures with symbols. If a work of art has total
authenticity, symbolic meaning will be contained in it of its own
accord," Chagall once said. His counterpart to Picasso's historical
painting 'Guernica', which speaks of suffering, is the devotional
painting 'White Crucifixion', which feels its way into that suffering.
|
|
White Crucifixion
1938
|
"If ever there was a moral crisis it was that of
paint, matter, blood, and all their constituents, the words and the
tones, all the things one makes a work of art out of. just as one
makes a life. For even if you cover a canvas with thick masses of
paint, irrespective of whether the outlines of shapes can be made out
or not, and even if you enlist the help of words and tones, it does
not necessarily follow that an authentic work of art will have been
created."
MARC CHAGALL
|
If Chagall had been so sensitively alert to coming
horror even before the outbreak of war, once war was declared his
feelings became panic-stricken. To be an inner emigre, and flee the
demands of political reality by withdrawing into a confined inner
realm of art (as Picasso did in Paris, for example), would have meant
idly waiting for the death camps. So it was that in spring 1940 he and
his family moved to Gordes in the Provence, where the sheer distance
from Nazi Germany guaranteed them a certain safety.
In Gordes, Chagall completed 'The Three
Candles' in 1940, after having worked at it for two years. Isolated from
cultural life and in constant fear of internment, he reviewed his
repertoire of images in a quite manic manner: the artiste, the loving
couple and the village, mutely available to the painter, consolidate
his safety from danger. Melancholy colours predominate, and the
fearfulness expressed in the timid gestures of the figures acquires a
still-life rigidity, like an emblem of transience, and is transfigured
by the death symbolism of the candles into a sombre
memento mori.
The French government came to an agreement with the
Nazis and France could no longer be considered safe for Chagall. He
was even seized during a raid in Marseilles and threatened with being
handed over to the Germans, but American intervention rescued him.
While vast numbers of his people were setting off on the tragic
journey to destruction, the famous painter was able to rely on public
help. On 7th May, Chagall and his family embarked for the United
States. The myth of the Wandering Jew, of Jewry restlessly on the
move, so often spoken of in his paintings, was no longer merely a
literary motif.
On 23 rd June, 1941, the day Germany attacked the
USSR, Chagall arrived in New York. After Paris and Berlin he now lived
in the third great metropolitan melting-pot. True to his own
experience, Chagall was always attracted to great cities, where
diverse and exotic peoples and cultures met; they were the elixir of
life to him. The family moved into a country house at Preston (Connecticut), some
way out of the city, before moving into a small New York apartment.
|
|
The Three Candles
1940
|
|
Responding to the events of the war from a distance
but with sympathy, Chagall modulated the deeply melancholy basic tone
of his last French paintings in the years that followed. War and
crucifixion dominated his subject matter, but the empathic intensity
was somewhat diminished. It was as if the daily news of atrocities
blunted Chagall's sentimental willingness to feel solidarity.
At all events, 'L'Obsession', painted in
1943, testifies to the impossibility of finding new images of concern,
year in, year out. The flames pouring from the hut, the Jew with the
three-branched candelabrum, the motif of flight in a cart, the
menacingly fiery colours have the banality of quotations from himself,
and only in the toppled crucifix, speaking of shattered hopes, does
Chagall find a way of indicating the tremendous horrors of recent
years. Nonetheless, the device has something too anecdotally trivial
about it, and the linking of the passion and war is now too familiar
to add any new dimension of pictorial sympathy to the powerful
'White Crucifixion'.
This suggests one of the fundamental problems of
Chagall's pictorial language: a tendency for motifs to acquire an
independent existence of their own, which threatens to rob them of
their expressive power. Familiar elements in his work - all the loving
couples, huts, animals, and later the religious images - are deployed
in new combinations to determine the character of any given painting.
Like words, they are strung together into evernew sentences, yet the
many repetitions deprive them of specific meaning. Their symbolic
value as representatives of another reality in a picture is levelled
out; instead they become quotations from Chagall's own ceuvre. Parts
of a seemingly mysterious world, they soon come to suggest nothing but
their own exoticism, and the reality they are supposed to stand for
becomes schematized.
|
|
L'Obsession
1943
|
"What counts is art. painting, a kind of painting
that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But
what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe
the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of
prayer for redemption and resurrection?"
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
|
Thus, in the end a Chagall painting will convey only
a mood, a mood which depends far more on the use of colour than on
exact content. The motifs merely serve a purpose of recognition,
endowing the typical Chagall hallmark; and in this way Chagall's
initial aura of strangeness is dispelled. The uniquely formulated
appeal for tolerance and understanding became in danger of being
submerged in a welter of the merely typical, and it was only Chagall's
dynamic capacity for stylistic change that enabled him to keep this
danger at arm's length. In this he shows himself to have been a
diligent student of abstract painting: his brushstrokes and
combinations of colours are the major determinations of specific
content and individuality in a Chagall painting, not the thematic
motifs.
'The House with the Green Eye' and 'Madonna with the
Sleigh' and above all 'Listening to the Cock'
testify to this. The figure of the cockerel, distinguished from
the red background only by its outline and the colourful head,
incorporates two more of Chagall's exemplary motifs: the dainty
position of the legs recalls the athleticism of his acrobats, while a
fiddler can be found tucked away in the cock's tail-feathers. Wittily,
Chagall has his cock ready to lay an egg, this image offering the same
unison of male and female seen in the cow against a black background,
whose head turns out to be the faces of two lovers. The crescent moon,
the tree standing on its head, and the hut round off this selection of
Chagall's stock imagery. The ruddy dawn heralded by the cock's crow is
gradually dispelling night, the province of the lovers, and this may
suggest that the picture is to be read as a document of new hope, that
gleam of hope Chagall felt as the collapse of Nazism approached.
"The darkness has gathered before my eyes," reads
the despairing final sentence that Chagall added to Bella's book,
First Encounter. When it was first published, in 1947, she had
already been dead for three years. She had died in mysterious
circumstances, of a viral infection, and all the signs that seemed to
betoken a better world had gone. The muse Chagall had so often
appealed to left her book as a testament, as a final spur for her
husband's work.
|
The House with the
Green Eye
1944
|
Madonna with the Sleigh
1947
|
Listening to the Cock
1944
|
|
|
'The Wedding', painted shortly after her
death in 1944, shows the artist retelling an episode from First
Encounter, the marriage of Bella's brother Aaron; yet the light,
exhilarated tone of Bella's account, which (like her husband's
autobiography) is marked by a mood of lightheartedness and playful
irony, has been displaced by sinister melancholy. Bride and groom
incline towards each other almost apathetically, and the angelic
musicians might well be playing a death march as a wedding dance.
Private grief had been added to the fateful course of world events and
Chagall's pictures at this time all centre upon the death of Bella.
|
|
The Wedding
1944
|
|
|
After the liberation of Europe, Chagall ventured
back into the Old World, where his career had begun for the first time
in 1946. The tentatively cheerful note struck in paintings such as
'Cow with Parasol' may derive from impressions of the return
visit to Paris. A hot sun is burning in the sky, but the parasol
promises relief... relief for the cow! The artist has adopted the
classic stylistic device of substitution, replacing man with an
animal: it is a device that is characteristic of Chagall's art, and is
used in exemplary fashion in this painting, where it contributes a
great deal to the anecdotal charm that is at the core of the picture's
irony. Nonetheless, sombre colours still dominate the painting, and
its humoresque qualities seem to be a compulsive insistence on
cheerfulness.
|
|
Cow with Parasol
1946
|
|
|
With 'The Falling Angel', Chagall painted a
last farewell to twenty-five years of artistic creativity, and the
work represents both the essence of his committed involvement with the
outside world and also his last word on a chronicle of increasing
barbarity. It had taken Chagall twenty-five tormented years to
complete the painting.
|
|
The Falling Angel
1923-1947
|
"What counts is art, painting, a kind of painting
that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But
what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe
the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of
prayer for redemption and resurrection?"
MARC CHAGALL
|
When he began it in 1922, with memories of the
Russian revolution still fresh, the picture was to have included only
the figures of the Jew and the angel and was meant as a representation
of the Old Testament vindication of the presence of Evil in the world.
Yet, in the years up to the painting's completion in 1947 the artist
increasingly incorporated motifs reminiscent of his little Russian
world, in the end even adding the Christian images of the Madonna and
of Christ on the Cross. His Jewish vision, his personal life-story,
and motifs of Christian redemption are incorporated into a
programmatic statement that sums up Chagall's entire oeuvre. The
images have been added one to another; in their totality, and in the
diversity of their associations, they represent Chagall's unceasing
endeavour to locate one single, truthful, universally valid visual
formula. Its very history, its long journey halfway round the world,
the whole generation required for its completion make this picture typical of twentieth century
art, of the displacement and jeopardy that beset a work in its newly
autonomous condition.
Its very history gave this picture that authority
which Chagall had always aimed at and which was commensurate with the
Jewish awe of images. His own odyssey, which ended happily with his
final return to France in summer 1948, had from avery early stage,
ever since Walden's Berlin exhibition, also been the odyssey of his
work.
|
|
