The richness and gentle humanity of Chagall’s spirit.
THE RICHNESS AND GENTLE HUMANITY OF MARC CHAGALL’S SPIRIT
The most stimulating art of modern times results from conflict between the demands of tradition and the restless desire for innovation. That fruitful dissonance plays out in the king- size Marc Chagall exhibition that’s currently drawing overflow crowds to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. It runs till June 11.
It’s a highly ambitious show, Canada’s biggest- ever Chagall exhibition and the most diverse, a tribute to the energy and will of its curators. The unfortunate title, Chagall: Colour and Music, expresses the notion that music affected Chagall’s thinking and therefore became a crucial element in his work.
That idea is neither credible nor interesting, a scholar’s desperate attempt at originality. Nevertheless, recorded music plays through the galleries, much of it chosen from stage productions Chagall designed. Instead of enhancing the occasion it sounds ( through the buzz of visitors) much like background noise in a shopping mall.
Visitors who wisely ignore that half of the title will find a deeply impressive exhibition. It brings together hundreds of Chagall paintings, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass windows, murals, sculptures and tapestries. The two dozen costumes he designed for stage productions are a good show in themselves, sometimes funny and sometimes graceful.
As a survey of a lifetime’s accomplishments, the exhibition demonstrates that Chagall was an even more audacious and compelling artist than most of us know. It changes our view of him. Those who admire him will be surprised at his largeness of spirit. Those who have never warmed to him may well decide he deserves their attention.
Raised an Orthodox Jew in Vitebsk, Belarus, Chagall ( 18871985) was loyal to Jewish tradition, though not observant in the religious sense. It was Jewish culture rather than Judaic doctrine that he embraced, making himself a vivid and loving commentator. The art critic Robert Hughes called him “the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century,” but that was never simple.
He began as a surrealist, a painter of impossible or highly unlikely scenes. He painted men with green faces and people who had the heads of birds. He did a self- portrait with seven fingers on one of his hands, perhaps a reference to an old Jewish saying that describes someone who keeps busy as having seven fingers. Characters and objects in many of his paintings defy the law of gravity: A mule flies through the air, pulling a cart. And of course a violinist pursues his art on a roof.
Surrealist or not, he chose Jewish subjects. “Ever since childhood I have been captivated by the Bible,” he said. “It has always seemed to me the greatest source of poetry of all time.” He made a series of large paintings on themes from the Hebrew Bible, which are permanently on show at the Chagall museum in Nice.
Jews and Jewish scenes appeared so often in the midst of his surrealist pictures that he developed a public that admired him partly out of sentimental nostalgia. Hasidic Jews may have had tough lives but in Chagall’s hands their experience is enchanted. We understood that violins in his paintings were inspired by amateur klezmer bands in his childhood rather than symphonies.
When the Nazis killed millions of European Jews ( including those in Vitebsk), references to the culture of his youth became remnants of a historic tragedy. Chagall’s mother tongue, Yiddish, was almost wiped out when most of those who spoke it were murdered.
Fiddler on the Roof, a Broadway show in 1964 and a movie in 1971, both broadened and certified Chagall’s status. The title came from his paintings and the tone from his evident affection for Orthodox rural tradition.
In his early years he travelled to St. Petersburg, Berlin and Paris, seeing modern art as it developed. He fled to the U.S. during the Hitler era. He would take the innovations of his own generation and rework them in his art. One big painting in this show, The Poet, makes a gracious bow to Cubism. It’s splendid but apparently not something he wanted to repeat. He didn’t ignore the ideas in new art but he liked them best when he could incorporate them into the Jewish tradition he had made his artistic home.
In his maturity, as one of the most respected of international artists, he accepted a long series of commissions. He designed a ceiling for the Paris Opera, a mural for Lincoln Center in New York and stained glass windows for cathedrals in Reims and Metz and more stained glass for a Jerusalem hospital. He responded so well to these assignments that sometimes his sponsors considered his work the most significant part of their buildings.
Those highlights of public art are well represented in Montreal, by working drawings, photos of Chagall preparing them and even reproduction of the Paris Opera piece that revolves on a gallery ceiling while visitors can lie down to get the best look.
Still, the grandest of those works takes second place to his paintings and drawings. It was there that he expressed, through careful observation and imaginative re-creation, the richness and gentle humanity of his spirit.