Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Lionza, a suburb of Vitebsk, then part of the Russian Empire and a small city of 60,000, half of whose population was Jewish like Chagall himself. Vitebsk was sometimes called the Toledo of Russia for its wooden charm and charming selection of sacred and secular buildings, its slightly cosmopolitan resemblance to its Spanish counterpart. Wood does not weather well a world war or two and nothing Chagall might recognize exists any longer, except for Chagall's talent and his relentless need to capture his memories in paint.
And none of those painted memories would have been possible without Chagall's mother who bribed the local high school headmaster with 50 rubles to allow her son to finish his education in a world where the stigmatization of Jews had reached the beginning of its worst slippery slope in an already troubled history. By the turn of the century, Russian Jews had been consigned to the Pale, Jewish settlements in the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, and Chagall's Belarus. Chagall's father hauled herring for a living, back-breaking, demeaning, barely compensated work while his mother operated a small market out of the family living room. And yet Chagall recalls never going hungry, the luxury of buttered bread always in his belly.
He discovered drawing from a friend who told him to borrow books and copy pictures. Chagall thought it was magic and told his parents he wanted to be an artist.
When I was a boy, I told my parents I wanted guitar lessons. For years, once a week, my mother took me to Mr. Costello's music store and I had guitar lessons. It hadn't occurred to me the sacrifice of this endeavor until one windy night the five dollar bill due for my instruction flew out of my mother's hand and we spent frantic hours on a chilly autumn night roaming the streets looking for it, finally finding it miraculously among a pile of leaves in a doorway. What our parents do to nourish us, how their selflessness replaces hunger, how we might never know save for some whipped up molecules on a planet spinning in space. This is what comes to mind when I think of Mrs. Chagall risking her life and a fortune to boot so that her son could study among the Christian boys of Vitebsk.
Chagall hit the art world as Cubism was all the rage and the last word in Paris and its effect on his entire body of work is obvious. But like Matisse, he was a master of color. Perhaps even more so, at least enough for Picasso to proclaim, "Once Matisse is dead, only Chagall will understand what color really is." More symbolic than abstract, his canvases are fantastical, the things of which dreams are made, flirtations with surrealism, but more rooted in reality, rooted nearly always in sentiment, but not gooey syrup-y sentiment, rather the well deserved and hard-won sentiment of loss and remembrance of things past.
Chagall is thought of as a Modernist, but more so as the preeminent Jewish Modernist, and his life was fittingly composed of many exoduses far from the home he loved. He studied in Paris, returned through Germany to his fiancé at home, barely survived the terrors of the first World War, escaped the second through the dangers of Vichy France from where he had to be recused by the United States, very nearly a victim of The Holocaust. Certainly too many of his paintings were, deemed 'degenerate' by the Nazis and burned in bonfires of vanity. He eventually settled in the south of France where he died what seems like yesterday to me, in 1985, at the age of 97.
I pass his murals, The Source and The Triumph of Music at The Met, several times a week. I bring every group visiting the UN to his breathlessly blue stained Peaceglass window. A few years ago, I glimpsed up at his ceiling at the Palais Garner, the old Paris Opera, to see his quadrants of colors celebrating the luminaries of ballet and opera.
And today, I chose this: I And The Village, 1911, from MoMAs collection.
This painting is a love-letter to his childhood, his boyhood home, and like love, it is hard to describe sequentially all that is happening. But let's try. The figures in the fore, a green man (add Fauvist to Chagall's lengthy resume) is connected by a barely perceptible line to the eye of a goat, reminding us the line between animal and man was as inextricable as it was tenuous to peasant life. Circles abound like planets, creating orbits and planes, one containing the tree of life exploding like stardust, another, a hillside where churches stand next to upside down houses, gravity giving way to memory, crosses coexisting with a Jewish peasant dressed in black and portentously carrying a scythe but in a living ballet with a lovely woman playing the ubiquitous Chagall fiddle. (The fiddler on the roof is not a Chagall convention, it is a Chagall invention.) It is nighttime, it is daytime, it is quiet, it is lively, it is as celestial as it is earthbound, and all of it bathed in the most magnificent jewel tones, like a tapestry for the downtrodden, like the backdrop for an opera in which the hero is the lowest born and most deserving.
Chagall was in Paris when he painted this, and didn't know a word of French. Alone and lonesome he retreated to the recesses of his warmest memories, a place where his parents bathed him in love and where his bride-to-be waited in a window for his return, before some mysterious divide presented itself between Jew and Gentile, before the world fell apart, and we can watch all of it unfold one hundred years later, his mind spinning out of control on this canvas with the sweetest symbols of love and remembrance.
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