Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall: Seventy Years Inside One Town

Some time in the 1950s Pablo Picasso told Françoise Gilot what he made of the painter living a few miles along the Côte d'Azur: "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour is... His canvases are really painted, not just tossed together... there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has." The painter in question had by then been dead to his own subject for thirty years. Vitebsk, the Belarusian town of his childhood, had been destroyed by the Nazis. He went on painting it until 1985.

Lyozna, and Fifty Rubles

He was born Moishe Shagal on 6 July 1887 in Lyozna near Vitebsk, in the Russian Empire, the eldest of nine children. His father Khatskl worked for a herring merchant; his mother Feige-Ite sold groceries. Vitebsk held some 66,000 people, more than half of them Jewish, and Ilya Repin called it the Russian Toledo for its mixture of Christian and Jewish architecture. Chagall remembered the pressure of it exactly: "I felt at every step that I was a Jew — people made me feel it." He witnessed pogroms and wrote of considering denying his Jewishness to survive.

Jewish children were barred from ordinary Russian schools. He attended a Jewish religious school, studying Hebrew and Bible, until his mother bribed a headmaster with fifty rubles to get him into a regular secondary school at thirteen. He discovered art by watching a classmate draw and asking how it was done; the friend told him: "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it." In 1906 he entered the Vitebsk studio of the realist Yehuda Pen, who taught him free because he was young and poor, and whose other pupils included El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine.

Saint Petersburg and Paris

He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1906, entering on a temporary internal passport borrowed from a friend, since Jews required one. He studied at a prestigious art school for two years and by 1907 was painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes; between 1908 and 1910 he studied under Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School, a Jewish designer for the Ballets Russes who served as proof that the thing was possible.

In 1910 he went to Paris. He was lonely, spoke no French and considered going home; instead he enrolled at the Académie de La Palette, spent hours in the Louvre with Rembrandt, van Gogh, Matisse and Gauguin, discovered gouache and used it to paint Russian scenes. Poets recognised him before painters did: Guillaume Apollinaire, struck by the Vitebsk canvases, called them "surnaturel!" Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger became friends. In 1914, aged twenty-seven, he took forty canvases and 160 works on paper to Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery in Berlin. The show was a triumph. He never saw the work again.

Commissar of Arts

He travelled on to Vitebsk to marry Bella Rosenfeld, intending to return. The First World War closed the border. They married, had a daughter, Ida, and he worked for the War Industry Committee in Petrograd from 1915, exhibiting in Moscow and Saint Petersburg and illustrating Yiddish books. The paintings of this period — the young couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk's faceted wooden buildings — are, in Michael J. Lewis's phrase, the most lighthearted of his career.

The October Revolution made him briefly an official. Anatoly Lunacharsky offered him the visual arts department at Narkompros in 1917; he refused, then reconsidered and returned to Vitebsk as commissar of arts. He founded the People's Art College and the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art, drew in El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich, rehired his old teacher Pen, and created what became known as the Vitebsk Renaissance. It ended in ideological warfare: the Suprematists condemned his "bourgeois individualism," Malevich's faction took the academy in May 1920, and Chagall left for Moscow. There he painted murals for the State Jewish Chamber Theater — one of them nine feet by twenty-four, dancers and fiddlers and acrobats and farm animals, called "Hebrew jazz in paint." In 1923, having written his autobiography My Life while waiting for an exit visa, he left for Paris. He stopped in Berlin to collect his pre-war paintings and found none.

The Bible

Back in France he began painting from memory, which is what he would do for the rest of his life. He worked for the dealer Ambroise Vollard on etchings for Gogol's Dead Souls, La Fontaine's Fables and the Bible — his finest graphic work. He travelled to Palestine in 1931 at Meir Dizengoff's invitation, staying two months, moved by the Wailing Wall and impressed by the kibbutzim. "In the East I found the Bible and a part of my very being," he wrote. Of the project he told Franz Meyer: "I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible." He had finished 66 of 105 plates by 1939; Edition Tériade completed the series in 1956. Jean Leymarie called the results monumental, informing "the text with a solemn intimacy unknown since Rembrandt."

Escape

The Nazis confiscated some 20,000 "degenerate" works from German museums and mocked his as "green, purple, and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air." He stayed in Vichy France and only grasped the danger in October 1940, by which point he and Bella were trapped. His daughter Ida, Alfred Barr of MoMA, the journalist Varian Fry and the diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who supplied forged visas, got them out; Fry had to pressure the French police to release Chagall after an arrest in Marseille. Stripped of French citizenship in April 1941, they sailed from Lisbon aboard the Mouzinho on 10 June — he gave drawing lessons to 119 refugee children on board — and reached Staten Island on 21 June, the day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

In New York he befriended Mondrian and Breton, haunted the Lower East Side for Yiddish newspapers and Jewish food, and designed sets and costumes for Léonide Massine's ballet Aleko, which premiered in Mexico City on 8 September 1942 to nineteen curtain calls with Rivera and Orozco watching. Bella died suddenly of a streptococcus infection on 2 September 1944; wartime restrictions meant the hospital had no penicillin. He stopped working for months.

The Ceiling

He returned to France in 1947 and settled on the Côte d'Azur near Matisse and Picasso. In 1963 André Malraux commissioned him to paint the new ceiling of the Palais Garnier, and the objections were immediate — a Russian Jew decorating a French monument, a modernist painting a historic building. Chagall registered it: "They really had it in for me... You live here most of your life. You become a naturalized French citizen... and still they despise you. You are not one of them." At seventy-seven he finished in a year: nearly 2,400 square feet of canvas, 440 pounds of paint, glued to polyester panels and hoisted seventy feet, honouring Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel. It was unveiled on 23 September 1964 before 2,100 guests with the chandelier dark; the orchestra played Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, the lights came up on the painting, and the applause settled the argument. Malraux asked: "What other living artist could have painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera in the way Chagall did?"

Why Marc Is Called a Genius

The faculty is colour, and the most credible witness is a rival. Picasso, who never became his friend, said flatly that after Matisse died Chagall would be "the only painter left who understands what colour is," and that nobody since Renoir had his feeling for light. That is not a compliment about charm; it is a technical judgement from the most competitive painter of the century. Raymond Cogniat described Chagall's colours as "a living, integral part of the picture," never "passively flat, or banal" — he sculpted and animated form through colour rather than drawing it and filling it in, and could produce explosive movement from two or three hues. The second faculty was metaphor: André Breton wrote that "with him alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting," and James Johnson Sweeney credited him with "the reawakening of a poetry of representation," threading between literal illustration and pure abstraction when almost every contemporary chose one or the other.

The counter-case: he repeated himself for decades. The floating lovers, the fiddlers, the goats and upside-down infants recur from the 1910s to the 1980s, and the charge that he turned the grim life of Hasidic Jews into a charmed and romantic world is not baseless. Maurice Raynal, praising him in 1927, described "a refined, anxious, childlike sensibility" — childlike being a double-edged word. He founded no movement and solved no formal problem; he absorbed Fauvism and Cubism as flavourings for a private language. And the private language was, by his own account, memory: an entire career funded by a town that stopped existing in 1941.

The Last of the First Generation

He died on 28 March 1985, aged ninety-seven. Robert Hughes called him "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century"; Michael J. Lewis noted he was the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists. He won the Carnegie Prize's third prize in 1939 for Les Fiancés, had a hundred-work New York show in 1926 and a forty-year MoMA retrospective in 1946. Beyond painting he made ceramics, mosaics, tapestries, sculpture and stained glass — windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, the Fraumünster in Zurich, the United Nations headquarters, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Jerusalem Windows at the Hadassah Medical Center. His animal-human hybrids and airborne phantoms fed directly into Surrealism. At various times he thought of himself as a Russian artist, a French artist and a Jewish artist, and the work never settled the question because it never needed to.