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Chagall's Russia
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19170 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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7 / 1991 |
1,783 Words |
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Mavis Guinard
Mavis Guinard, a writer on the arts, lives in Switzerland. |
Though less colorful than the jewel-toned paintings of his later years, the works of Chagall now emerging from the Soviet Union after years of neglect reveal the source and inspiration of themes he painted over and over again. This spring, the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Switzerland mounted a major exhibition, Chagall in Russia, that showed, in these early works, the artist finding his own voice.
Born in Vitebsk in 1887, Marc Chagall grew up an observant small boy in a Jewish quarter of wooden houses, churches, fences, ships, and synagogues. Among a wealth of relatives were a grandfather who was a cantor and also a butcher, an uncle who was a hairdresser, another who played the violin, and a father who worked "like a galley slave" to keep butter and cheese and herrings on the table for his eight children.
Chagall somehow persuaded his parents to let him take painting lessons from a local artist. Then, to escape a dull future as a photographer's retoucher, he went to St. Petersburg. He won a scholarship to study at the Society for the Protection of Fine Arts, but, as a Jew, he had to apprentice to a sign painter just to obtain a special residence permit to stay in the city. He went on to study with Leon Bakst. A few art collectors saw his paintings and gambled on his talent. One let him stay in a servant's room, another gave him a small monthly allowance to try his luck in Paris.
Enthusiastic and curious, Chagall found that, in the Paris of 1910, "no academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, and the shop windows or the museums of Paris." He discovered the Fauves and the beginnings of Cubism. Eventually he moved into a studio in La Ruche, among painters from all over including Leger, Modigliani, and Soutine. There he launched into a productive frenzy: In My Life he tells how his canvases stood in a mess of eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins, sometimes "the remains of a smoked herring, cut in two--the head for the first day, the tail for the next." Though he refused to be classified, Chagall showed with the Cubists at the Salon des Independants. He met poets and writers--Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and Apollinaire, the latter of whom called his paintings "supernatural" and dedicated a poem to him. Bakst, his former teacher, in Paris with the Diaghilev Ballet, dropped by to approve: "Now, your colors sing."
Rediscovering Roots
After his first one-man show in Berlin, Chagall went back to
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