TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capmil.3

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.6 KB | 104 lines

                                                                                April 8, 1985

Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism

Marc Chagall:  1887-1985


"He grabs a church and paints with the church," wrote a poet of
the cubist era, Blaise Cendrars. "He grabs a cow and paints
with the cow...He paints with an oxtail/With all the dirty
passion of a little Jewish town/With all the exacerbated
sexuality of provincial Russia." Soutine?  Strangely enough, no:
Marc Chagall.

Cendrars' rhapsody reminds one how different the late decades
of that hugely productive painter were from his early ones. One
does not think of late Chagall in terms of the "dirty passion:"
and "exacerbated sexuality" that struck his (mostly Gentile)
friends in modern painting's golden age, Paris before 1914.

Instead one thinks of an institutionalized, not to say
industrialized, sweetness:  the Chagall of the blue, boneless
angels, the muralist of Lincoln Center and the fresco painter
of the Paris Opera, the stained-glass artist who flooded
interiors from the U.N. headquarters in New York City to Reims
Cathedral in France to the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical
Center in Jerusalem with the soothing light of benign sentiment.
His quasi-religious imagery, modular and diffuse at the same
time, would serve (with adjustments: drop the flying cow, put
in a menorah) to commemorate nearly anything, from the Holocaust
to the self-celebration of a bank. When he died last week at
the age of 97 at his home near Nice, Chagall's career had
spanned more than three-quarters of a century of unremittingly
active artmaking.

He was seen by an immense constituency of collectors and
museumgoers as the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th
century, even though he was not Orthodox and professed, if
anything, a discreet and nonmilitant atheism. He had a lyric,
flyaway, enraptured imagination, allied to an enviable fluency
of hand; the former could weaken into marzipan poignancy, the
latter into routine charm. He left behind him an oeuvre of
paintings, drawings, prints, book illustrations, private and
public art of every kind, rivaling Picasso's in size, if not
always in variety or intensity. The number of novice collectors
who cut their milk teeth on a Chagall print (Bella with bouquet,
floating over the roofs, edition size 400, later moved to the
guest bedroom to make room for a large photorealist painting of
motorcycle handlebars) is beyond computation. Chagall may have
given more people their soft introduction to art dreams than any
of his contemporaries. He was the fiddler on the roof of
modernism. If he sometimes paid his spiritual taxes in
folkloric sugar, it may not matter in the long 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 some artists receive
their subject matter, their grammar of signs, in childhood. He
was a child of the Russian ghetto, born in the town of Vitebsk
in 1887; his father was a herring packer, his grandfather a
cantor and kosher butcher, his uncle an amateur violinist. The
imagery of music and shtetl folklore, mingled with the face of
his childhood sweetheart (and future wife), Bella Rosenfeld,
furnished the unaltering ground of his work for 80 years, long
after the close-knit and weak little societies it represented
had been incinerated by Hitler and Stalin. "All the little
fences, the little cows and sheep, all the Jews, looked to me
as original, as ingenuous and as eternal as the buildings in
Giotto's frescoes," he reminisced in the '20s.

He developed his wry, sweet and irrepressibly meshuggeneh
visions in the two 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 of Diaghilev'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
the slaughteryards and found that his neighbors were Soutine,
Leger and Modigliani. Back in Russia by 1914, Chagall waited
out World War I (and was plunged into the 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 of untainted
modernism offered. In cubism, he felt, the subject was "killed,
cut to pieces and its form and surface disguised."  Chagall did
not want to go so far, but the flattening, reflection and
rotation of cubist form gave his early paintings their special
radiance and precision. In Paris Through the Window, 1913, we
enter a rainbow world, all prismatic light and jingling
crystalline triangles. It is full of emblems of stringent
modernity:  the Eiffel Tower, a parachutist, a train upside-down
but still insouciantly chuffing. It owes a lot to his friend
Robert Delaunay, who made abstractions of Paris windows. But the
picture is plucked back from the analytic by its delicious
strain of fantasy:  a cat 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 on his
hand. He was unquestionably a prince of tropes. "With Chagall
alone," said Andre Breton, leader of the surrealists, "metaphor
made its triumphant entry into modern painting."  And though the
procession that followed its entry had its tedious stretches,
involving some fairly shameless plucking on the heartstrings,
the best of Chagall remains indispensable to any nondoctrinaire
reading of the art of the 20th century.

--By Robert Hughes