Homebound

Marc Chagall lived in Paris and in the US, but he couldn't leave the shtetl behind, says Mark Hudson

It’s an image that transports us straight to a mythic shtetl of the mind: the world of Jewish towns and villages in the Pale of Settlement on the western borders of the old Russian Empire, where the painter Marc Chagall was raised in a Hasidic household, where the round of manual and domestic labour was governed by a meticulously observed time table of prayer and mystical devotion.

It’s a world where imagery appears freed from rational moorings, where a giant postman is seen floating across the sky, lovers levitate through sheer emotional ecstasy, and it doesn’t seem the least bit surprising to see the roofs of a village hanging upside down at the top of a painting, as they do in the jewel-like painting, Le Sapin Bleu to be offered in December's Impressionist and Modern Art in Paris.

Rendered in brilliant primary colours, the human and animal figures seem to float free on the rich yellow background with a sense of hermetic purpose that seems to defy the notion of a rationally organised composition. The smiling red goat, a regular Chagall image representing vital energy, love and freedom; the head-scarfed woman with a wooden pail, who seems absorbed in her own reverie; the man in green carrying the eponymous brilliant blue tree, who seems about to fall off the bottom of the canvas. What are they to each other, let alone the artist?

Then there are the smaller figures that seem to merge in and out of the background, like the naked mother and child in the bottom left corner, possibly representing Chagall’s first wife of Bella, the great love of his life. Two moons suggest that this brilliantly lit tableau of freely interacting personal and universal symbols is taking place at night.

If the painting takes us immediately to the Belarus of Chagall’s childhood with a magical-poetic vision that seemed already fully formed at the time of his departure for Paris in 1910, it’s disconcerting to note the work’s date: 1961. By this time Chagall was living in comfort on the Cote d’Azur, and hadn’t been near his formative landscape for decades.

It was Chagall‘s great achievement to have appeared simultaneously an essentially primitive visionary effortlessly in touch with his ancestral consciousness, and a dandy modernist who flitted through the avant-garde coteries of Paris, Moscow and New York, sampling from the formal strategies of Cubism, futurism surrealism, in some of the 20^th century’s most dynamic moments.

Born Moishe Shagal, in 1887, near Vitebsk in what is now Belarus, into a life of  of intense spirituality and “infinite hardship”; his father, employed shifting barrels for a herring merchant, rose at six each morning to pray for the souls of the dead. The young Chagall felt at every step that he was a Jew. He narrowly avoided being murdered in a pogrom and was so removed from the world of 'graven images' that he was totally unaware of art in any form until he saw a fellow pupil drawing, an experience he described as “like a vision, a revelation in black and white”. He decided to become an artist himself after copying illustrations from books in the school library. 

“Chagall was unaware of art in any form until he saw a fellow pupil drawing, an experience he described as 'like a vision'"

Yet he was aware from an early age that the culture of his childhood was fast disappearing and that he had a role in recording it. On moving to St Petersburg to study in 1906, he realised that the only way for a Jewish artist to prosper in imperial Russia was to hide their religious identity or openly flaunt it. Chagall chose the latter path, both as an “expression of principle” and a calculated career move.

Arriving in Paris in 1910, aged 23, he stepped directly into the world of the international avant-garde, and was at once passionately exhilarated and desperately lonely – dreaming of the picturesque alleys of his home town Vitebsk, as he marvelled at the old masters in the Louvre. Falling in with a group of other young modern artists, almost all of them Russian emigres, only made his nostalgia all the more intense.

While it would have suited Chagall for the world to believe that he brought his singular vision fully evolved to the City of Light, that vision was essentially created, or certainly enabled, in and by Paris.

Birth (1910) painted shortly before his departure for Paris, vividly recreates the circumstances of a birth in a Russian-Jewish home, in a neo-primitive style full of quirky details such as the cow being led into the room at the head of a procession of well-wishers. But the conception of space is relatively conventional, the bed is clearly grounded on the wooden floor, around which the lamp creates a believable pool of light.

In another painting of the same title, executed just a few months later after his move to Paris, Chagall’s conception of reality is already devolving into abstraction, as a diagonal beam of light slices the painting in two, the rays of a lamp adding to the work’s powerful geometry.

While Chagall claimed to have avoided contact with other artists, as the months progressed he was clearly hoovering up the influences of modernist painting from every direction: Fauvism in The Green Goat (1911), with its flatly painted animal filling most of the composition; a Cubist-derived proto-surrealism in To Russia, Asses and Others (1911) in which a milkmaid’s head floats off into space. In Paris through the Window, a human-faced cat looks out at the Eiffel Tower, rendered in patches of colour redolent of the Orphism of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, his only close friends among the artists of Paris. If this painting’s setting draws it into the canon of classic Parisian Modernism, its animistic visionary qualities, evident in the cat and a double- headed male figure, take us straight back to Vitebsk. It was only by getting far away from it that he could fully inhabit the landscape of his childhood, through an idiosyncratic, yet highly sophisticated synthesising of avant-garde influences.

“With the transition into old age, much that was essential to him, spiritually and emotionally, could now only be recovered through art

Indeed, almost all Chagall’s best known works, the vast majority referring to his life in Vitebsk, were painted in that initial brief sojourn in Paris, immediately before the First World War. And far from receding with the years, the hold of his formative imagery seems to have become even more intense.

By the time he came to paint Le Sapin Bleu, nearly half a century later, he had returned to Russia, where he was appointed culture commissar for Vitebsk after the Revolution, and then come back to Paris before fleeing to the US during World War II. He finally returned to France, and a comfortable existence in Nice in 1948. With the transition into old age, much that was essential to him, spiritually and emotionally, could now only be recovered through art.

Yet Chagall had lost none of his appetite for innovation. He experimented with new mediums such as ceramics, murals and undertook major stained-glass commissions for churches and other institutions around the world. The influence of the latter form seems evident in Le Sapin Bleu, in which the strong primary colours are contained within clear boundaries, and irradiate the surface of the painting as though illuminated from within. Colour, vital in all Chagall’s art, is accorded to objects through the impulses of his symbolic imagination. The 'meaning' of the blue fir tree in this affirmative, loosely devotional and profoundly personal painting is something we can more easily infer through our hearts than our minds.

Journalist and author Mark Hudson is Art Critic of The Independent and author of Titian: the Last Days.

Impressionist and Modern Art | 4 December, Paris

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