Marc Shagall

Fiddler on the roof of modernismMarc CHAGALL 1887-1985 He grabs a church and paintswith the church, wrote a poet of the cubist era, Blaise Cendarrs.He grabs acow and paints with the cow He paints with an oxtail With all the dirtypassion of a little Jewish town . Soutine? Stangely enough, no MarcShagall. Cendrars rhapsody reminds one howdifferent the late decades of that hugely productive painter were from hisearly ones. One does not think of late Chagall in terms of the dirty passion and exacerbated sexuality that struck his mostly Gentile friends in modernpainting s golden age, Paris before 1914.Instead one thinks of an institutionalized, notto say industrialized, sweetness the Chagall of the blue, boneless angels, themuralist of Lincoln Center and the fresco painter of the Paris Opera, thestationed-glass artist who flooded interiors from the U. N. headquarters in NewYork City to Reims Cathedral in France to the Hadassah-Hebrew UniversityMedical Center in Jerusalem with the soothing light of benign sentiment. Hisquasi-religious imagery, modular and diffuse at the same time, would serve with adjustments drop the flying cow, put in a menorah to commemorate nearlyanything, from the Holocaust to the self-celebration of a bank. When he died atthe age of 97 at his home near Nice, Chagall s career had spanned more thatthree quarters of a century of unremittingly active artmaking.He was seen by an immense constituency ofcollectors and museumgoers as an artist of the 20th century. He hada lyric, flyaway, enraptured imagination, allied to an enviable fluency ofhand the former could waken into marzipan poignancy, the latter into routinecharm.

He left behind him an oeuvre of paintings, drawings, prints, bookillustrations, private and public art of every kind, rivaling Picasso s insize, if not always in variety or intensity.

The number of novice collectorswho cut their milk teeth on a Shagall print Bella with bouquet, floating overthe roofs, edition size 400, later moved to the guest bedroom to make room fora large photorealist painting of motorcycle handlebars is beyond computation.Chagall may have given more people their soft introduction to art dreams thenany of his contemporaries.

He was the fiddler on the roof of modernism.

If hesometimes paid his spiritual taxes in folkloric sugar, it may not matter in thelong run for at Chagall s death one consults the paintings of his youth,whose wild eccentric beauty is indelible.Chagall s was a textbook case of the way someartists receive their subject matter, their grammar of signs, in childhood.

Hewas a child of the Russian ghetto, born in the town of Vitebsk in 1887 hisfather was a herring packer, his grandfather a cantorand kosher butcher, hisuncle an amateur violinist.The imagery of music and shtetl folklore, mingledwith the face of his childhood sweetheart and further wife , Bella Rosenfeld,furnished the unaltering ground of his work for 80 years, long after theclose-knit and weak little societies it represented had been incinerated byHitler.

All the little fences, the little cows and sheep looked to me asoriginal, as ingenuous and as eternal as the buildings in Giotto s frescoes, he reminisced in the 20s.He developed his wry and sweet visions in thetwo great forcing houses of modernism between 1900 and 1925 Paris and Russia.As a student in St. Petersburg up to 1910, he came under the wing ofDiaghilev s designer Leon Bakst an enlightened Jewish patron, Max Vinaver,sent him to Paris that year. He took a studio in a rickety building near theslaughteryards and found that his neighbors were Soutine, Legel and Modigliani.Back in Russia by 1914, Chagall waited out World War I and was plunged intothe Revolution in the company of Tatlin, Malevich and Kandinsky.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive especially for a young artist, eager to absorb what this supreme moment ofuntainted modernism offered.In cubism, he felt, the subject was killed, cutto pieces and its form and surface disguised.

Chagall did not want to go sofar, but the flattening, reflection and rotation of cubist form gave his earlypaintings their special radiance and precision. In Paris Through the Window ,1913, we enter a rainbow world, all prismatic light and jingling crystallinetriangles. It is full of emblems of stringent modernity the Eiffel Tower, aparachutist. a train upside down but still insouciantly chuffing.It owes a lotto his friend Robert Delaunay, who made abstractions of Paris windows.

But thepicture is plucked back from the analytic by its delicious strain of fantasy acat with a man s head serenading on the sill, a Janus head Chagall himself,looking forward to modernism and back to the village? displaying a heart onhis hand. He was unquestionably a prince of tropes. With Chagall alone, saidAndre Breton, leader of the surrealists, metaphor made its triumphant entryinto modern painting.And though the procession that followed its entry hadits tedious stretches, involving some fairly shameless plucking on theheart-strings, the best of Chagall remains indispensable to any nondoctrinairereading of the art of the 20th century.