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"Painting as Poetry"
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Russia: The Early Years
1887-1910
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Self-Portrait
1910 |
Marc Chagall: poet, dreamer, exotic apparition.
Throughout his long life, the role of outsider and artistic eccentric
came naturally to him. Chagall seemed a kind of intermediary between
worlds: whether as a Jew with a lordly disdain for the ancient ban on
image-making, or as a Russian who went beyond the realm of familiar
self-sufficiency, or as the son of poor parents, growing up in a large
and needy family, yet going on to establish himself in the
sophisticated world of elegant artistic salons. The potential for
assimilation and the liberality that distinguish Western culture are
best assessed by its responses to outsiders; and Chagall personified
the singular charm of the outsider his whole life long. His biography
was far from everyday, and its reflection in his art took on the form
of strange images. His life and art together added up to this image of
a lonesome visionary, a citizen of the world with much of the child
still in him, a stranger lost in wonder - an image which the artist
did everything to cultivate. Profoundly religious and with a deep love
of the homeland, his work is arguably the most urgent appeal for
tolerance and respect of all that is different that modem times could
make.
Marc Chagall, the eldest of nine children, was born
on 7th July, 1887, into a family of Vitebsk Jews. The world of Eastern
Jewry was both narrow and peaceful, going its quiet way between
synagogue, fireside and shop (according to Chagall's own
tongue-in-cheek account in My Life). Though only half of his
home town's population of 50,000 were Jews, Vitebsk had all the
characteristic traits of the shtetl: wooden houses, a rural
atmosphere, poverty. Thanks to his mother, Marc was enabled to go on
to the official state school after he had finished at the cheder
(Jewish elementary school). Strictly speaking, Jews were not
admitted to the state schools, but Feiga-Ita, enterprising woman that
she was, bribed the teacher. So it was that Marc had the chance to
escape the toils of neighbourly and nepotistic connections; instead of
remaining trapped in humble confinement, he took violin and singing
lessons, began to draw, and spoke Russian rather than Yiddish. Above
all, he made contact with the bourgeois world where cosmopolitan and
cultural interests were valued; a life style that his father, Sachar,
who sold herrings and was perpetually weary, could never have offered
him.
The young Chagall was persistent enough to obtain
the residence permit which Jews needed for the capital. In the winter
of 1906/1907, together with his friend Viktor Mekler, he moved to St.
Petersburg. In Vitebsk he had attended Yehuda Pen's art school, and
now he was out for a thorough artistic training in the cultural heart
of Russia. 'Young Girl on a Sofa', a portrait of his
sister Mariaska, which he painted on a visit home in 1907, is one of
his earliest works and testifies to a new-found artistic confidence
(which was vital in view of his family's scepticism). As if in a
photograph, the girl is seen reclining on an outsize divan, legs
coquettishly crossed, wearing a beret. Chagall's family were Orthodox
Jews, but they were willing to be photographed, and so this painting,
with its everyday motifs and rather stiff pose, has something of the
familiar and accepted air of camerawork. The decora-tive flatness, the
blurred distinction between the figure and the blanket and the soft,
rounded lines contouring the body reflect the influence of
contemporary St. Petersburg painting. None of this can quite conceal
the technical weaknesses of the piece, however, particularly evident
in Mariaska's limbs.
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"My father had blue eyes but his hands were covered in calluses. He
worked, prayed, and kept his peace. Like him, I was silent too. What
was to become of me? Was 1 to stay like that my whole life long,
sitting by a wall, or would 1 haul barrels about, too? I took a look
at my hands. My hands were too soft... I had to find some special
occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away
from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the
meaning of my life. Yes, that was what 1 was looking for. But in my
home parts 1 was the only one who had ever uttered the words 'art' or
'artist'. 'What is an artist?' I asked."
MARC CHAGALL
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Young Girl on a Sofa (Mariaska)
1907
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'Red Nude Sitting Up' , painted a year
later (also in Vitebsk), is a very different work, more powerful and
of greater originality. Chagall had just won a scholarship to the
celebrated Svanseva School where Leon Bakst taught, who was a major
link with the West and an influential advocate of symbolist painting.
Bakst wrote for the periodical Mir Iskusstra (The World of Art).
Through Bakst, Chagall acquired a finely tuned sense of his role
as an artist and must have been helped towards new means of visual
expression. In this new piece of work, the artist shows his nude
frontally and with a weighty, direct physicality that is quite unlike
the etude-like reticence of the picture of Mariaska. The
unconventional red shades and their contrast with the green of the
plant suggest that Chagall was familiar with recent French painting,
in particular with that of Henri Matisse, an impression that is
confirmed by the fragmented rendering of the figure, making it
torso-like and rapt.
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"With my 27 roubles in my pocket, the only money my father ever gave
me for a journey, I disappear, still rosy-cheeked and curly-haired, to
St. Petersburg, accompanied by my friends. The die is cast.''
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
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Red Nude Sitting Up
1908
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Chagall was not the smug and lordly artist-prince he
portrayed himself as in the 'Self-portrait with Brushes',
where we see him gazing disrespectfully out of the picture. But by
1909 he was no longer a naive lad either. Now, in his apprentice years
in the capital, away from his own origins among the simple folk of the
provinces, Chagall was able to turn to the subjects and motifs that
were to be typical of his future work: village scenes, peasant life,
intimate views of a small world. Not until he sensed this contrast
with his Bohemian life in the big city, with its financial problems
and the possibility of fame, did Chagall acquire his tender and loving
eye for the life of the shtetl.
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"My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is
empty, but they say I have talent.''
MARC CHAGALL "My
Life"
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Self-portrait with Brushes
1909
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It is this tension that enriches the quality of
another work of 1909, 'The Family or Maternity'. The
large areas, tranquil figures and simple gestures produce a monumental
sense of dignity, translating everyday Jewish rituals into a timeless
realm of iconic peacefulness. Compositionally, the painting derives
from a traditional Western configuration of the circumcision of Christ
with the high priest, madonna and child, with Joseph discreetly
remaining in the background. Giving us the option of reading his
painting allegorically by borrowing the formal arrangement of a
Christian story for his everyday scene, Chagall preserves the
ambiguity of his own artistic technique, which was midway between
naivety and symbolically gestural formality - much in the way that
Paul Gauguin, his idol at that time, painted the Nativity in the South
Seas.
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"When I considered my father
beneath I his lamp I dreamt of skies and stars far from our street.
All the poetry of life was in my father's sadness and silence, to my
mind. There was the inexhaustible source of my dreams: my father, who
could be compared to the immobile, secretive and silent cow that
sleeps on the roof of the hut."
MARC CHAGALL
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The Family or Maternity
1909
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'Russian Wedding', on the other hand,
appears to be a genre painting, but in fact reflects a happy
development in Chagall's own private life. In autumn 1909, through
Thea Bachmann, he became acquainted with Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter
of a Jewish jeweller, who also came from Vitebsk and who was studying
in Moscow. She too had left her original homeland. In 1915 she was to
marry Chagall, and many of his paintings, which were dedicated to her,
were to draw their special harmony from their relationship.
In My Life Chagall writes that he "... found
the house full of serious men and women", "and the crowds of black
figures dimmed the daylight. Noise, whispers, then suddenly the
piercing cry of a new-born child. Mama, half-naked, lay in bed, pale,
a tender pink. My youngest brother was seeing the light of the
world."' In 1910 Chagall worked up this scene into the painting
'Birth', a key work in the art of his early Russian
years. With its dramatic lighting, the scene might be happening on a
stage, and shows what Chagall had learnt from Bakst, who often
designed stage sets. To the left we see the exhausted mother lying on
the bed, the sheets heavily bloodstained, the impact heightened by the
red canopy. The wet-nurse, in hieratic posture, is holding the baby
somewhat awkwardly. Beneath the bed crouches a bearded figure, maybe
the father. From the right we see inquisitive neighbours and farmers
shoving into the room (an old Jew is leading a cow) and others are
participating in the happenings by looking in at the window.
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Russian Wedding
1909
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Birth
1910
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The traditional cast of a Christian Nativity are all
present here: the Holy Family, the wet-nurse and herdsmen, coming in
to share in the event. But the artist has eliminated whatever the
Biblical tale offers in the way of anecdote, and indeed there is a
strict structural divison between the birth scene with the two women
on the left, and the right-hand half where the men are mere onlookers.
The personal experience described in My Life, the everyday
event of birth, and the allusion to the Christian motif have all been
integrated into a unifying structural principle that is fundamental
and quite independent of any specific culture.
In 'Birth' we see at its most ambitious Chagall's
attempt, so characteristic of his early work, and well documented in
his autobiography, to transcend conceptual boundaries and create new
syntheses. But even if the visual logistics are clear and assured, the
formal solution remains unsatisfying. The ideas are persuasive, but
the picture falls apart into two halves. In his quest for an artistic
language that might render the complexity of his conceptual insights,
Chagall could no longer expect inspiration from Russian art, itself in
its infancy. The only place to find answers was in the capital of the
art world: Paris.
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Woman with a Bouquet
1910
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