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From: ESRCs East West Programme [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Serguei A. Oushakine
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Subject: From Shtetl to Château: a new biography of Marc Chagall (NYRB)

...At the beginning of the Revolution the avant-garde actively worked with
the government. Chagall prospered under the Bolsheviks. In 1918 the state
bought ten of his paintings and appointed him commissioner of arts for
Vitebsk. The following year he became director of the Vitebsk's People's Art
College. By the spring of 1919, however, he had begun to realize that the
individualism and egotism of his art was anathema to Bolshevist thought. The
sculptor El Lissitzky, an infinitely more committed and ideologically driven
revolutionary than Chagall, brought the ranting Malevich to the school as a
professor. Malevich and Lissitzky then set about turning it into a
stronghold of Suprematism. Using time-honored tactics of the far left, their
first step was to denounce Chagall's art as bourgeois and decadent. Next
they took over the school, firing the entire staff, rechristening it the
"Suprematist Academy," and terrorizing the students into accepting their
collectivist aesthetic. In a foretaste of what would happen to artists and
intellectuals under Stalin, the Chagall family was given twenty-four hours
to vacate the rooms they occupied in the school. In June 1920 Chagall left
Vitebsk for Moscow with his wife Berta (later Bella) and infant daughter
Ida. He was penniless....


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22471

Volume 56, Number 5 · March 26, 2009
From Shtetl to Château
By Richard Dorment
Chagall: A Biography
by Jackie Wullschlager

Knopf, 582 pp., $40.00
1.

The painter known to the world as Marc Chagall was born Movsha (Moses)
Shagal on July 7, 1887, into a poor family living on the fringes of the
Russian Empire. When he died ninety-eight years later, he was the last
surviving member of the School of Paris and a multimillionaire with a flat
on the Quai d'Anjou in Paris and a villa in the South of France.

Swept up in the most momentous events of the twentieth century, including
two world wars and the Russian Revolution, his long life was punctuated by
dislocation, flight, immigration, and exile. As a young man he managed to
arrive in Paris in 1911, just as the city was becoming aware of Cubism, then
on his return to Russia watched the ascendancy of Suprematism, in the work
of Malevich and Lissitzky. He was able smoothly to incorporate stylistic
components from both of these crucial developments in twentieth-century art
into his own work without becoming identified with either. He was esteemed
by the Surrealists in Paris between the wars but never considered himself a
Surrealist, and exhibited alongside exiled European artists in New York in
the 1940s without mingling with the émigré community. In his later years he
became internationally famous for his stage sets and costume designs, as
well as for his decorative work in stained glass, mural painting, and
ceiling decoration. His life is a gift to a biographer.

His art, though, is another story. Jackie Wullschlager's substantial
biography draws on a wealth of unpublished letters still in the possession
of his descendants to tell the story of Chagall's journey from shtetl to
château. But not for an instant did it convince me that Chagall was a great
or even an important artist. He himself believed that by the time of his
final departure from Russia in 1922 his best work was behind him, even
though he was to live for another sixty-three years. But is there really all
that much to respect even in the early paintings? What, finally, did he
contribute to the history of twentieth-century art? The more I read about
Chagall the artist, the less original his paintings looked, though I must
add that the author's descriptions of his theater and ballet designs
rekindled the admiration I have long felt for his work for the stage.
NYRB / Season of Migration

The opening chapters vividly evoke the world of Chagall's boyhood in
Vitebsk, which lay within the Pale of Settlement, the area of western Russia
to which Catherine the Great had confined the Jews living in her empire. He
was the eldest of nine children born to Yiddish-speaking followers of the
Hasidic sect; his parents were poor but not impoverished. Khatskel, his
father, hauled crates in a herring warehouse on the banks of the Dvina
River; his illiterate mother, Feiga-Ita, ran a successful business selling
provisions from home.

Vitebsk (today in Belarus) was a town of rickety wooden dwellings, public
bathhouses, unpaved streets, onion-domed churches, and more than sixty
synagogues. On the poor side of town every householder kept goats, chickens,
and a cow in the yard. Rabbis, Talmudic scholars, matchmakers, musicians,
and elderly Jewish peddlers who could be seen wandering from town to town
with sacks on their backs: the sights and sounds of Chagall's childhood
would become the subject of his art.

Although he ceased to practice religion at the age of thirteen, Chagall's
work is suffused with imagery drawn from Jewish ritual and folklore,
particularly from Hasidic festivals and feast days when song and dance were
used to express the mystical union of man and nature. Through the joy of
Hasidism, his biographer believes, he "transformed the cramped, dull
back-streets of his childhood" into a color-saturated "vision of beauty and
harmony on canvas."

The transformative dimension of Chagall's work is lost to us today, but it
is precisely what so impressed his contemporaries. The artist and critic
Alexandre Benois, for example, was amazed that a dirty, smelly "Jewish hole"
like Vitebsk with "its winding streets, its blind houses and its ugly
people, bowed down by poverty, [could] be thus attired in charm, poetry and
beauty in the eyes of the painter."

When Chagall's ambitious mother bribed a teacher at the local school to
ignore the quota on Jewish pupils, she put her son on the long road out of
Vitebsk, and eventually out of Russia-not least because the boy, who until
then spoke only Yiddish and wrote in Hebrew, was taught Russian and made to
use the Cyrillic alphabet. He left school in 1905 without a diploma, but by
then he had become obsessed with drawing and determined to become an artist.

Such an activity was unimaginable in a world with no pictorial culture of
any kind. "In our home town," he wrote, "we never had a single picture,
print or reproduction, at most a couple of photographs of members of my
family.... I never had occasion to see, in Vitebsk, such a thing as a
drawing." When a classmate saw paintings by the teenage Chagall, he blurted
out that his friend was "a real artist!" Chagall claimed that he had never
heard the word "artist" and did not know what it meant.

All the more remarkable then that his mother managed to enroll him in the
only art school in the whole of the Pale of Settlement, the academy in
Vitebsk run by a Jewish portrait and genre painter who had studied at the
St. Petersburg Academy. Thanks to the solid, traditional techniques taught
by Yuri Pen, Chagall learned to draw from plaster casts and to work from a
life model. And although he was to reject Pen's realistic style of painting,
he learned from his teacher's example to find his subjects in shtetl life
all around him. In time, Chagall would reconfigure the sights and sounds of
his childhood as helium-filled fantasies in which cows sail through the
night sky and fiddlers fiddle on roofs. But to do so he had to leave
Vitebsk. As Wullschlager shrewdly comments, "Chagall's art was fuelled by
the twin drives to escape and to remember."

At age nineteen Chagall moved to St. Petersburg, where at last he could see
the work of the old masters in the Hermitage, immerse himself in the
theater, and form friendships with other artists, writers, and patrons. But
he painted the works of his first maturity, Birth, Russian Wedding, and The
Dead Man, between 1909 and 1911 not in St. Petersburg but during long stays
back home in Vitebsk, as though he needed to reconnect with his Jewish roots
before venturing into the unknown milieus of the avant-garde. What makes
these pictures modern is Chagall's crude, childlike rendering of heavily
outlined figures and buildings, an early instance of his use of expressive
distortion that Wullschlager links to the expressionist theater productions
he had just seen in St. Petersburg. To find inspiration in "primitive"
(peasant and folk) art was not in itself particularly unusual among
progressive artists at this date, but the Jewish themes and the notes of
absurdist whimsy are very much Chagall's own.
2.

Russian art around 1900 feels suspended in a lingering Symbolist twilight,
embodied in the work of the World of Art group of painters. Promoted by
impresario Sergei Diaghilev, these aesthetes alternated between art nouveau
decadence and eighteenth-century nostalgia. Benois, Léon Bakst, and their
colleagues preferred painting in watercolor to painting in oil, and
scenography or mural painting to working on canvas. Though Chagall tended to
dismiss the World of Art painters as aristocratic and effete, on his return
to St. Petersburg in 1909 he enrolled in the school where the most famous of
them taught.

The lush sets and costumes Bakst was then designing for Diaghilev's Ballets
Russes set a gray world alight. His palette of hot oranges, shocking pinks,
and boiling ultramarines perfectly suited the bold, Slavic rhythms of Igor
Stravinsky's music and Michel Fokine's choreography. The last and most
sensuous Orientalist of all, Bakst electrified audiences in Paris and London
with the exotic costumes and sets he designed for Scheherazade, the ballet
with the plot once described as "an orgy followed by a massacre" in which
half-naked slaves and harem girls writhed and expired against backdrops
painted in colors of unearthly intensity.

Chagall studied with Bakst only for six months, but it was Bakst who set the
young artist's imagination free by cautioning him against refinement and
encouraging him to simplify his form and liberate his brushwork. Above all,
he taught Chagall about color. "I have a taste for intense colour," Bakst
said, "and I have tried to achieve a harmonious effect by using colours
which contrast with each other rather than a collection of colours which go
together...." For this, Chagall was grateful. "My fate was decided by the
School of Bakst.... Bakst changed my life. I will never forget that man."
And because Bakst had moved to Paris to work with Diaghilev in the spring of
1910, a year later the twenty-three-year-old Chagall followed.

In May 1911, with the financial support of an early patron, Marc Chagall
made the four-day train journey from Russia to Paris. Speaking no French and
knowing only a handful of Russians, he was nevertheless enchanted with the
city. "I seemed to be discovering light, colour, freedom, the sun, the joy
of living, for the first time." A few days after reaching Paris he made his
way to that year's Salon des Indépendants to see the Cubists all Paris was
talking about. Only it wasn't the work of Picasso and Braque that hung in
Room 41 of the salon that year, but the "Salon Cubists"-Henri Le Fauconnier,
Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, and Robert Delaunay.

Chagall understood instinctively that to become a modern artist he had to
abandon traditional perspective, foreshortening, and modeling, and
assimilate the fractured geometrical planes and shifting perspectives of
Cubism into his work. But at that stage in his life, he could not have known
that he was looking at feeble imitations of Cubism, not the real thing. He
took Gleizes as his model and enrolled in the school where Le Fauconnier and
Metzinger taught.

This is where I part company with Wullschlager, who sees more significance
in the work of Chagall's first French period than I think it merits. In
pictures like I and the Village (1912; Museum of Modern Art, New York) or
The Cattle Dealer (1912; Kunstmuseum, Basel), faceted planes are used not to
create volume or to explore pictorial space but as mannerisms or stylistic
tricks to give the flying fiddlers, farmyard animals, and upside-down
figures a veneer of modernism. Sure, Chagall added the brash color and
fairy-tale imagery, but ultimately these pictures, like Le Fauconnier's, are
pastiche Cubism-in Chagall's case, an imitation of an imitation. To say as
Wullschlager does that Chagall contributed to the history of modern art "an
expressive, mystic sensibility that challenged the form-conscious
rationalism of Western art" is to admit that what is original about his work
is what he painted, not how.

Compare Chagall's two versions of Birth-the first painted in Vitebsk in
1910, the second in Paris in 1911. In the first version, the setting is a
wooden shtetl house painted in a somber palette of muddy red, sour yellow,
and brown. Linear perspective leads the eye to the triangle formed by dark
red bed curtains parted to reveal a naked mother lying on bloodstained
sheets, a grim midwife holding a newborn child, and a father cowering under
the bed, while in the background neighbors and a rabbi look in at the window
and push through the door.

The Cubist version is painted in harsh primary colors. Now the blood-soaked
mother is only one focus of attention in a much more diffused and brightly
colored composition. Chagall opens up the closed interior by turning the
walls and floor into flat geometric planes, so that our eye zigzags in and
out of space as though we were looking at a picture painted on a folding
screen. But by scattering a dozen or more tiny figures across the canvas, he
dissipates the picture's pictorial cohesion and dramatic impact. Now the
roof seems to have come off, and the house has morphed into a fairground or
circus where figures tumble from the sky and farm animals sit down to
dinner.

But to what purpose? Cubism isn't particularly suited to narrative or genre,
but Chagall doesn't yet know this. What is more, in their Cubist paintings
Picasso and Braque effaced their own personalities and tended to avoid the
direct expression of emotion or autobiography. Intense feeling, if it
appears in a "true" Cubist portrait or still life, is expressed obliquely,
embedded in the very texture of the picture. Chagall's version of Cubism
could almost be called the polar opposite of the real thing.

Both versions of Birth show that the arrival of a child in a poor Jewish
household was a semipublic event accompanied by community ritual and
rejoicing. But the brutal 1910 version of Birth is the more coherent and,
for me, therefore, the more powerful. Here is Wullschlager's commentary on
the Cubist version of the picture:

    This is birth as psychological reality: the sense of the indissolubility
of life and death, and that for each individual woman birth is at once
miracle, symbol of hope, and frightening physical ordeal.

As criticism this isn't helpful because, as so often when Chagall's admirers
write about his work, it focuses on the subject, not the handling of color,
line, draftsmanship, composition, space, and so forth.

Why, then, did discriminating critics like Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars
write with such appreciation about Chagall? One answer is that Chagall timed
his arrival in Paris perfectly. The Ballets Russes' productions of
Scheherazade and The Firebird had just enthralled Parisians, who were
experi- encing a craze for all things Slavic. Chagall's pictures,
Wullschlager writes, "looked like strange, exotic intruders into Parisian
art." To this observation I would reply, "exactly"-this is what blinded his
contemporaries to their crude constructions, heavy attempts at humor,
cringe-making whimsy, and fundamental lack of originality. Then too, both
these critics wrote loyally about Chagall's paintings but they rarely said
anything penetrating or significant about them. To Apollinaire, for example,
Chagall is "an extremely varied artist, capable of painting monumental
pictures, and he is not inhibited by any system."

The same critic used the word "surnaturel" to describe Chagall's work, but
Chagall didn't know what it meant, and I must admit that as applied to
Chagall's paintings, which have nothing to do with the exploration of the
unconscious, neither do I. Beginning in 1913 Chagall built up a devoted
following in Germany, where collectors saw his color-drenched fantasies and
use of distortion as having something in common with Expressionism. But if
one compares Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin street scenes with Chagall's nostalgic
fantasies of life in the old country, it is hard to understand why.

In June 1914 Chagall returned to Russia for what he thought would be a
three-week visit and found himself trapped by the outbreak of war. Instantly
the hard-edged Cubism of the first Parisian period vanished in favor of a
softer and more integrated style sometimes described as Cubo-Futurism. In
pictures like the monumental Jew in Red (1914), it is as though the
fragmentation of form that characterized the Cubist phase had simply never
happened. And soon enough, a new stylistic mannerism appeared that enabled
Chagall to fill the void left by Cubism.

As revolutionary fervor mounted in the years 1915-1917, Kazimir Malevich's
first Suprematist paintings brought art closer to abstraction than it had
ever come before. The fierce purity of Malevich's geometric designs in
black, white, and unmixed primary colors perfectly expressed the radical
impulse to symbolically wipe the social slate clean by eliminating
representation of any kind. Ultimately this Lenin among artists would paint
the series of white squares on white grounds that are among the most
influential works of the twentieth century. "I say to all," wrote Malevich,

    Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for
in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant. We,
suprematists, throw open the way for you.

The power of Suprematism lay in its elimination of individuality, of
expression, of memory, and of the past.

Just as Chagall had arrived in Paris on the crest of the first wave of
Cubism, so now he returned to Russia as Suprematism swept the old art away.
The difference was that this time the new art movement made his folksy
imagery-indeed imagery of any kind-instantly passé. And just as he had
assimilated Cubist form without, I think, necessarily understanding it, so
now he appropriated Suprematist style without having the slightest idea that
for Malevich abstraction was a means toward the elimination of the self in
order to achieve a higher level of spiritual experience.

Chagall wasn't an explorer and he wasn't an intellectual. In The Apparition
(Self-Portrait with Muse) of 1917-1918 he adds Suprematist circles of silver
and blue to what is basically a traditional Annunciation, with Chagall
taking the place of the Virgin Mary and substituting a figure representing
his personal muse for the Angel Gabriel. The glad tiding the angel brings to
the painter is the arrival of a new art inspired by the Russian Revolution.
Chagall takes circular forms that in Malevich signify spiritual
transcendence and turns them into the angel's feathered wings. Where
Malevich pares down, Chagall fills the background with the paraphernalia of
the artist's studio. The effect is certainly decorative-all cloudy blue-gray
curlicues and shimmering white disks-but it is hard not to feel that Chagall
has taken something profound and searching in Malevich and turned it into
stylistic embellishment. And it is almost endearing to see that, far from
aspiring to subsume his identity into the whole, Chagall here sees the
entire Russian Revolution from the perspective of how it will affect his
work.

At the beginning of the Revolution the avant-garde actively worked with the
government. Chagall prospered under the Bolsheviks. In 1918 the state bought
ten of his paintings and appointed him commissioner of arts for Vitebsk. The
following year he became director of the Vitebsk's People's Art College. By
the spring of 1919, however, he had begun to realize that the individualism
and egotism of his art was anathema to Bolshevist thought. The sculptor El
Lissitzky, an infinitely more committed and ideologically driven
revolutionary than Chagall, brought the ranting Malevich to the school as a
professor. Malevich and Lissitzky then set about turning it into a
stronghold of Suprematism. Using time-honored tactics of the far left, their
first step was to denounce Chagall's art as bourgeois and decadent. Next
they took over the school, firing the entire staff, rechristening it the
"Suprematist Academy," and terrorizing the students into accepting their
collectivist aesthetic. In a foretaste of what would happen to artists and
intellectuals under Stalin, the Chagall family was given twenty-four hours
to vacate the rooms they occupied in the school. In June 1920 Chagall left
Vitebsk for Moscow with his wife Berta (later Bella) and infant daughter
Ida. He was penniless.

Yet again Chagall's timing was miraculous. One of the characteristics of
progressive Russian art at this time was its close association with the
stage. Just as Chagall arrived in Moscow, the impresario Aleksai Granovsky
brought his Yiddish Chamber Theater, a modernist company specializing in
radical productions of Yiddish plays, to the city. At once he commissioned
Chagall to work on the sets, backdrops, and costumes for an evening of three
plays about shtetl life by the classic Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem. In
the last months of 1920 Chagall locked himself in the auditorium of the
theater for forty days to paint the murals that are now universally regarded
as his greatest artistic achievement. These theater murals are on view in an
exhibition devoted to the Russian Jewish theater at the Jewish Museum in New
York City until March 22.[*]

There are seven in all-including four large upright panels depicting the
archetypal Jewish characters of the folk musician, the wedding jester, the
Torah Scribe, and the wedding dancer, who also symbolize the arts of music,
drama, literature, and dance. These paintings are unlike anything Chagall
had done before because they combine monumental scale with simplified form.
Realizing that the audience needed to take them in from a distance and also
that they should not compete with the stage sets, he seeks clarity in the
composition and suppresses extraneous decoration.

For the first time, Chagall now used the whole stage as his canvas. As
Wullschlager explains:

    When the curtain, decorated with goats, rose on the first night, the
audience gasped at the eerie effect by which the actors, painted by Chagall
and moving in exaggerated staccato bursts..., looked identical to the
portraits of them in the largest mural: both were Chagall's creations, the
only difference being that the live ones spoke, the painted ones stayed
silent. The theatrical effect was utterly original.... The audience came as
much to be perplexed by this amazing cycle of Jewish frescoes as to see
Sholem Aleichem's skits.... Ultimately, the [evening] was conducted, as it
were, in the form of Chagall's paintings come to life.

And here, I think, we come to the one aspect of the visual arts where it is
possible to speak of Chagall's genius. He is a stage designer comparable to
Bakst in the way he uses radiant color and fantastic costumes as thrilling
complements to music and dance. Though the Moscow Yiddish Theater never
employed him again, and in the 1930s the French never appreciated (or
perhaps never realized) that they had a designer of such talent living in
Paris, he came into his own in the 1940s when he was living in New York and
Léonide Massine commissioned him to design the scenery and costumes for the
New York Ballet Theater's new production of the romantic ballet Aleko, based
on the Pushkin poem with music by Tchaikovsky. Once again, he painted the
costumes and sets by hand to create a spectacle the dance critic Edwin Denby
considered far more interesting than the music or the choreography.
Wullschlager writes:

    From now until the end of his life, Chagall would be irresistibly drawn
to a stage, a ceiling, a wall, a cathedral window.... In America,...he
embraced the large scale as the new country reawakened possibilities,
dormant since Moscow's murals, that would shape the rest of his career.

One of the joys of my own childhood was the Metropolitan Opera's production
of The Magic Flute with sets and costumes by Chagall. Though I don't share
Wullschlager's enthusiasm for his later murals for the Paris Opera and the
foyer of the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center (more soft-focus, blowsy
sentimentality), in this, at least, we agree.

Unlike his enemy Malevich, Chagall got out of Russia with his wife and
daughter, arriving via Berlin in Paris in the summer of 1923. The numerous
flower and circus paintings of the next decade and the illustrations for
Dead Souls, The Fables of La Fontaine, and the Bible, which he worked on
throughout the 1930s, are visually appealing, but ultimately they feel
unimportant. In them you have no sense that Chagall is breaking new ground
or attempting to renew his sources of inspiration.

The story of Chagall's escape from Vichy France in April 1941 with the help
of the determined young American diplomat Varian Fry could have been lifted
from the script of Casablanca, and Wullschlager tells it so well that you
can't wait to see what's going to happen next. And she adds a coda. Twenty
years later, when Fry asked all the artists he had helped during the war
each to donate a lithograph to be published in a book that would be sold for
charity, Chagall alone refused, only finally donating a work after Fry's
death. That Wullschlager bothers to tell this story is in itself an
indication of her growing disillusionment with her subject.

With the death in 1944 of his remarkable first wife, Bella, whose loving and
stabilizing presence fostered Chagall's creativity, we can add his name to
twentieth-century art's roll call of egotistical monsters. Bella's
successor, Chagall's British-born companion Virginia Haggard, would leave
him, but not before he had beaten her to the ground with his fists. Within
days, Chagall found the woman who was to be his second wife, the dreadful
but canny Valentina (Vava) Brodsky. With Vava in charge of his sales,
Chagall became a rich man, but also an object of contempt to both Picasso
and Matisse, his neighbors in the South of France. Wullschlager tells this
fascinating story with unflagging verve. Her impeccable research brings into
focus the colorful cast of supporting characters with whom he shared the
dramatic upheavals of his life. But I don't think his art deserves a
biography this good.
Notes

[*]"Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949," the
Jewish Museum, New York City, November 9, 2008-March 22, 2009; and the
Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, April 25-September 7, 2009. The
catalog, by Susan Tumarkin Goodman and with essays by Zvi Gitelman, Benjamin
Harshav, Vladislav Ivanov, and Jeffrey Veidlinger, is published by the
museum and Yale University Press.