Love and war
How the Russian Revolution sparked an outpouring of art from Marc Chagall and his contemporaries
FOR a few heady years after the Russian Revolution of 1917, artists and Jews enjoyed freedoms they had never had under the czar.
For the Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall, that was bliss times two. In 1918, he founded the People’s Art School — not in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but in his hometown of Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus. For the next four years, he and his fellow teachers and students made art that practically hummed with hope.
Their joy was short-lived: By 1922, Soviet authorities were dictating what kind of art they thought best served the state. Chagall’s school disbanded.
You’ll see this little-known chapter in the artist’s life at the Jewish Museum, now home to “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922.” Unwieldy title aside, this is an elegant exhibition, filled with loans from France’s Pompidou Centre. Among the standouts: “Double Portrait With Wine Glass,” a joyous painting of the newlywed Chagall sitting on the shoulders of his bride, Bella, raising his glass as a man — possibly a wing-less angel — floats above them. Other paintings show a world gone topsy-turvy, with landscapes turned on their side, blown sideways by new freedoms.
Stopping by for the show’s opening the other day were Chagall’s granddaughters, 63-year-old fraternal twins Bella and Meret Meyer. They grew up in France, where Chagall spent the later part of his 97 years. (He died in 1985.)
“Did he play with us? Not at all,” Meret Meyer tells The Post. Adds her sister, Bella: “He was playful in his own way. He’d tell stories, his life stories, and most of them were about [his wife] Bella. She was a writer and a poet and understood him perfectly and stood by him.”
Bella died in 1944 in America, from strep throat. And while Chagall married again, she was the love of his life: One look at these paintings confirms it.