an angel inhis head

As a new exhibition of
Marc Chagall’s paintings
opens in Liverpool, Sue
Hubbard considers the life
of Russia’s visionary arti
AN
ANGEL
IN HIS
HEAD
It was not an auspicious beginning for Moyshe
(Moses) Shagal, who liked to claim that he had
been ‘born dead’. The year was 1887, the town
Vitebsk, near the Polish border in Belarus, when
his distraught but pious Yiddish-speaking parents pricked the lifeless body of their first-born
son with needles in the hope of a getting a reaction. When there was none, they swept up the
immobile child and plunged him into a trough
of freezing water until he finally uttered a whimper. It is hardly surprising that when he arrived
in Paris in 1911 a wide-eyed innocent art student,
Marc Chagall – as he was later to call himself –
was subject to fainting fits and had a stammer.
He was, as he admitted, ‘scared of growing up’,
and even in adulthood ‘preferred dreaming
about love and painting it in my pictures’.
Chagall is something of an enigma, a painter
who at times swam against the avant-garde tide
of 20th-century art to create whimsical images
of air-borne lovers, blue clouds, pink donkeys.
(His fiddle-players with green faces would
become the prototype for Fiddler on the Roof,
the 1968 musical by Jerry Bock and Sheldon
Above: Marc Chagall
photographed in 1915;
right: Chagall, Homage
to Gogol, 1917
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THE ARTIST: © 2013 PHOTO AUSTRIAN ARCHIVES/SCALA FLORENCE. GOGOL: © ADAGP PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2013
Harnick.) A new exhibition at Tate Liverpool
hopes to shine a light on his formative years as
a painter, from his Paris works of 1911–14 to
paintings such as The Promenade (1917–18) and
his murals for the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre in Moscow (1920), completed two years before he left Russia. For although many have tried
to interpret Chagall’s paintings there is no real
consensus as to what they mean. Rather, they
are painted dreams, a private iconography made
visible on canvas. To trap their meaning would
be as impossible as trying to bottle clouds. Even
his rival and sometime friend Pablo Picasso was
bemused: ‘I don’t know where he gets those
images … he must have an angel in his head.’
Chagall has always divided opinion. Throughout his 75-year career he produced a prodigious
10,000 works. His warm, human imagery, full
of personal references to the lost world of his
Hasidic Russian childhood, touched a popular
nerve. A storyteller in the folkloric vein, he
seemed to capture the emotions and pathos of
ordinary people disinterested in intellectual
arguments about deconstruction and abstraction in art. A number of critics dismissed him as
sentimental, while for others he was a brilliant
colourist and the linchpin of Expressionism, an
artist who restored to painting what was being
dismissed by hardline modernism: metaphor,
allegory and narrative.
In Vitebsk, as the eldest of nine children
from an impoverished family, his talent for
drawing was not much appreciated and he had
been expected to help provide financial support
for his siblings. His father, Zachar Shagal,
worked in a herring warehouse, while his mother, Feiga-Ita, ran a small grocery shop. Despite
later rosy memories of his childhood, Chagall
referred to Vitebsk as stifling, ‘a strange town,
an unhappy town, a boring town’. Although his
family adhered to conservative Hasidic beliefs
that didn’t allow the graphic depiction of anything created by God, his mother, after his
constant pestering, was enlightened enough –
or ground down enough – to enrol him in a local
art class, though one of his uncles did refuse to
shake his hand when he began to paint figures.
Hasidic Judaism – which means ‘piety’ –
promotes spirituality through the popularisation of Jewish mysticism. Founded in Eastern
Europe in the 18th century by Rabbi Israel Baal
Shem Tov as a reaction against overly legalistic
Judaism, Hasidic teachings cherished the sincerity and concealed holiness of the unlettered
common folk. Many of these Jews tended to live
in scattered villages far removed from intellectual centres. This populist emotional revival encouraged the belief that the ‘Immanent Divine’
resided in everything – something that gives a
clue to Chagall’s internal world. This was emphasised by prayer and deeds of kindness that
sat alongside the rabbinical tradition of study.
In 1906 Chagall left home for St Petersburg
with a small sum of money that he had managed
to wrangle from his father in order to enrol in
the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of
Fine Art. But he didn’t fit in and rebelled against
the classical training where, as he complained,
he ‘had to acquaint himself with the wretched
nostrils of Alexander of Macedonia or some
other plaster imbecile’. Despite poverty and
near starvation, he subsequently managed to
enrol in the Zvantseva School in St Petersburg
under the tutelage of the renowned painter and
designer Léon Bakst.
After his move to Paris in 1911 Chagall struggled to survive and was, at first, deeply homesick, mainly because he couldn’t speak French.
Extremely poor, he painted in his studio at
La Ruche (‘The Beehive’) in the nude to spare
his threadbare clothes, often cutting a herring
in half to make it last for two days. Something of
an outsider, a Russian Jew who didn’t know the
language, he liked to stress his autodidactic
credentials. ‘I visited neither academies nor
professors. I found my lessons in the city itself,
at each step, in everything. I found them among
the small traders in weekly open-air markets,
among the waiters in cafés, the concierges,
peasants and workers.’ Despite this selfmythologising, he did, in fact, seek out a degree
of formal training at the Académie La Palette
and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière,
where, unusually for a Jewish artist, he painted
from the nude model.
While in Paris, an interest in Cubism taught
Chagall how to add drama to the figure by faceting and fragmentation. His strange Self-portrait
with Seven Fingers (1912–13) shows something of
MUSIC: © ADAGP PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2013. SELF-PORTRAIT: COLLECTION STEDELIJK MUSEUM, AMSTERDAM © ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2013
Left: Chagall, Music,
1920; right: Chagall,
Self-portrait with Seven
Fingers, 1912–13
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had ambitions of becoming an actress and
whose parents were anything but smitten by the
impoverished, shaggy-haired young painter
whom she wanted to marry. Deeply in love, he
said he only had to open the window of his
room and ‘blue air, love and flowers entered
with her’. His marriage at the age of 28 precipitated a number of paintings of flying lovers
where he and Bella soar rapturously over
Vitebsk. Chagall had only intended to stay a
short time in his home town, but became
trapped by the outbreak of the First World War.
His appointment as the city’s commissar for
art was not a success: the art school preferred
Social Realism to support the Revolution, not
flying lovers and green cows.
Chagall had been a supporter of that historic
1917 upheaval, which appeared to give Jews
more freedom, but after his disappointment as
art commissar he moved to Moscow to work in
the Yiddish Chamber Theatre. Then, in 1922
(the end point of Tate’s exhibition), he settled
first in Berlin and then Paris. Increasingly
alarmed by the rise of Nazism, he subsequently
moved in 1941 to the greater safety of New York.
Here again he was not happy, firstly because he
didn’t speak the language and then, in 1944,
his beloved Bella died of a viral infection. After
that, ‘everything turned black’. Although he
had a relationship with Virginia McNeil, the
mother of his son, David McNeil, she was much
younger and left after seven years. Worried
about his emotional state, his daughter, Ida,
from his first marriage, found Valentina Brodsky, a Russian, to become his housekeeper. She
soon became his second wife.
Chagall did not fit easily into any of the
‘-isms’ or contemporary movements of his lifetime. In some ways he was to Russian Jewish
art what William Blake and Stanley Spencer
were to British art. At heart he was a romantic,
a mystic and a dreamer, the wandering Jew from
an obscure town in a strange part of Eastern
Europe, who yearned nostalgically for an age
and a way of life that was all but lost. It was not
that he had no interest in the avant-garde, but
he used its tropes to his own ends to create
a world influenced by the ‘Immanent Divine’
that he felt in his heart resided in everything.
Love always mattered more to him than
art. ‘Only love interests me and I am only in
contact with things that revolve around love …
Impressionism and Cubism are foreign to me,’
he wrote. ‘Art seems to me to be above all a state
of soul … Let them eat their fill of their square
pears on their triangular tables.’
z ‘Chagall: Modern Master’, Tate Liverpool,
8 June – 6 October. www.tate.org.uk, £5
National Art Pass (£10 standard)
Sue Hubbard is a poet, novelist and art critic.
Her new novel about the painter Paula
Modersohn-Becker, ‘A Girl inWhite’, is published
by Cinnamon Press, and her latest poetry
collection, ‘The Forgetting and Remembering
ofAir’, is published by Salt
FIANCEE: COURTESY KUNSTMUSEUM BERN © ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2013. PROMENADE/DEPARTURE: © ADAGP PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2013
the emotional and aesthetic tug-of-war he was
experiencing. Through the left window is the
Eiffel Tower, the icon of modern Paris, while on
the right is an image of a Baroque church from
his native Vitebsk. His seven-fingered figure
pays homage to the distortions of Cubism.
Chagall was reclusive and kept himself to
himself, favouring the company of other Jewish
artists such as Chaim Soutine and Amedeo
Modigliani, along with Robert Delaunay and his
Jewish-French wife, Sonia Delaunay – who cofounded the Orphism art movement noted for
its use of strong colours and geometric shapes.
But he also became friends with a number of
Symbolist poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire.
Among those to whom he became close was
Blaise Cendrars, who wrote of his friend: ‘He
grabs a church and paints with a church/
He grabs a cow and paints with a cow.’ The
paintings of this period show in his bold use of
colour the influence of Fauvism and his interest
in the circus. Many of the Paris paintings are
among his most dynamic. In a single night of
feverish productivity he produced Dedicated to
My Fiancée (1911). He submitted it to a major
exhibition and had to persuade the organisers
that it was not pornographic, with its leering
Minotaur’s head and disembodied arms
and legs that appeared to have been thrown
together pell-mell.
In 1914 Chagall returned to Vitebsk to be
with his fiancée, Bella Rosenfeld, a talented
gold-medal student from a wealthy family who
Left: Chagall, Dedicated
to My Fiancée, 1911;
below left: Chagall,
Departure for War, 1914;
below right: Chagall,
The Promenade, 1917–18
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