Marc Chagall

The Artist as Peacemaker

Fred Dallmayr

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000169768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

This book follows Chagall's life through his art and his understanding of the role of the artist as a political being. It takes the reader through the different milieus of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – including the World Wars and the Holocaust – to present a unique understanding of Chagall's artistic vision of peace in an age of extremes. At a time when all identities are being subsumed into a "national" identity, this book makes the case for a larger understanding of art as a way of transcending materiality. The volume explores how Platonic notions of truth, goodness, and beauty are linked and mutually illuminating in Chagall's work. A "spiritual-humanist" interpretation of his life and work renders Chagall's opus more transparent and accessible to the general reader.

It will be essential reading for students of art and art history, political philosophy, political science, and peace studies.

1
THE STORY OF A LIFE

1. Life in Vitebsk

My treatment of Chagall in these pages as a humanist and artist-peacemaker is not arbitrary or whimsical. It gains ample support from his own early autobiography titled My Life (Ma Vie) completed in 1922. Similar autobiographical accounts are a staple genre in the humanistic tradition. Yet, in this case, caution is required: Chagall’s account does not easily reflect or fit into this tradition. Simply put: the painter disrupts or explodes any restrictive or narrowly self-centered notion of human life. In his case, the “human” on every side transgresses itself into other regions: into the domains of the non-human, the extra-human, and supra-human. Thus, the title My Life has an ambivalent or allegorical character, putting into question both the “myness” (as a controllable property) and the “liveliness” (as a self-induced impulse or potency).

Chagall was born on July 6, 1887, in the town of Vitebsk in Belarus, then part of Tsarist Russia. As he himself reports, he was “born dead,” a little lifeless creature in a bundle carried in his mother’s arms. As it happened, just at the time of his birth, a great fire broke out in a cottage at the outskirts of Vitebsk, in the quarter “where the poor Jews lived.” As a result, everything was carried out from this quarter, beds and mattresses, and the mother and her bundle came along. Eventually some bystanders pricked the baby with needles, then plunged it into a “pail of water” until the baby finally “emitted a feeble whimper.” Certainly, a strange and inauspicious beginning – but auspicious in its own way. When much later Chagall returned to the place of his birth, he could not help but notice the incongruity with his later career: “How could I possibly have been born here? How does one even breathe?”¹

His early childhood was lived with his family in the provisional town of Vitebsk with its usual hustle and bustle. But there was always a glancing and a yearning “beyond.” As he writes in his memoir:

I say nothing of the sky, of the stars of my childhood. They are my stars, my sweet stars; they accompany me to school and wait for me on the street till I return. Poor dears, forgive me I have left you alone on your dizzy height.

And then there were the streets of Vitebsk with their beggars and rich people, their horses and carriages, their Jewish and non-Jewish inhabitants.

As a boy I used to watch you from our doorstep, childishly. When the walls cut off my view, I climbed up on a little post. If still I could not see you, I climbed upon the roof. Why not? My grandfather used to climb up there too.²

The pictures he painted in his childhood and early youth – some of them assembled in My Life – were all images of Vitebsk, more particularly of small towns around Vitebsk which appeared to him as the embodiment of a typical Jewish shtetl, with its real and more-than-real activities and events. There were butchers and shopkeepers, rabbis and street sweepers, old and young people – but many of them seemingly endowed with the capacity of levitation, thus floating gently or eerily above the scenes like angelic beings or luftmenschen (“airborne people”). Yet, Chagall’s attachment to his childhood locality was not simply a sign of parochialism or pure nostalgia. As one of his biographers, Jonathan Wilson, notes perceptively:

Throughout his painting career, Chagall insistently brought the world of big history to the little street corners of his old neighborhood as he knew it in early childhood: the Holocaust takes place on the streets were Chagall grew up, and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallish (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there. If he is not bringing history to Vitebsk, then Chagall is carrying Vitebsk with him, in a suitcase of the mind, wherever he goes.³

Thus, the life Chagall portrays in his early autobiography is not the life of a provincial recluse but that of a restless searcher and explorer, even when confined in a narrow context. This, of course, makes reading My Life a constant adventure or discovery, especially for a humanist sensitive to complicated life stories. Listen to what he says about his mother. She was born in Lyozno

where I painted the priest’s house, the fence in front of the house, and in front of the fence the pigs. … In our eyes, our mother had a style that was rare, as rare as was possible in her workaday surroundings. But I don’t want to praise, to overpraise my mother who is no more. Can I speak of her at all?

And this is how he describes her ordinary, not quite ordinary conduct: “I see her managing the household, ordering my father about, always building little dream houses, setting up a grocery shop, supplying it with a whole wagon load of merchandise, without money, on credit.” And about her speech:

She loved to talk. She fashioned words and presented them so well that her listener would smile in embarrassment. Like a queen, erect motionless, her pointed coiffure in place, she asked questions through closed lips, that scarcely moved. But there was no one to answer her. At a distance I was the only one to follow her.

And here finally a gentle invocation or imploration:

Where are you now, my dear little mother? In heaven or on earth? … I don’t ask you to pray for me. You know yourself what sorrows I may have. Tell me, from the other world, from Paradise, from the clouds, from wherever you are: does my love console you?⁴

Thus, as one can see: from early on in his life, distance and nearness embraced each other. Although destined (as he probably felt) for some greatness, the budding artist did not lack local fondness, attachment to family relations, loyalty to small beginnings. Listen to how he talks about his father: “What is a man worth if he is worth nothing – if he is priceless? That is why it is difficult for me to find the right words for him.” At one point he made a picture of his father: “You remember I made a study of you. Your portrait was to have the effect of a candle that bursts into flame and goes out at the same moment.” The portrait was not idealized or pretty but bore tribute to the hardness of his father’s life: “He lifted heavy barrels and my heart used to twist like a Turkish bagel as I watched him lift these weights and tied the herring with his frozen hands.” His clothes would sometimes shine “with herring bones”; but farther off, “light from above would fall into reflections from every side.” Everything about his father seemed to Chagall like “enigma and sadness; an image inaccessible.” In the evening, he would come home in his “work-soiled” clothes. But from one of his pockets he would draw a pile of cakes of frozen pears: “With his brown and wrinkled hand he would pass them out to us children. They were more delicious, more savory and more ethereal than if they had come from the dish on the table.”⁵

Beyond his immediate parents Chagall was attached to his grandparents and uncles, in fact the entire set of relations from Vitebsk and Lyozno. As he recalls: “My grandfather’s house was filled for me with the sounds and smells of art – but it was only from the cowhides, hung up and drying like linen.” His love or affection, he realizes, was not based on any reciprocated appreciation of his artistic talents: “As I understood then, my grandfather as well as my wrinkled grandmother and all my family completely ignored my art (what an art that does not even pretend to resemblance!) and valued meat more highly.” To Chagall, this lack of esteem was of no concern at all:

It is all one to me if people are pleased and relieved to discover in these innocent adventures of my relatives the enigma of my pictures. … I am not joking. If my art played no part in my family’s life, their lives and their achievements greatly influenced my art.

What was at the root of his early paintings were small life experiences, experiences in and around the home, in daily activities, in the synagogue, in prayers – especially on holidays:

Behind my back, they are beginning the payer and my grandfather is asked to intone it before the altar. He prays, he sings, he repeats himself melodiously and begins over again. … And when he weeps, I remember my unsuccessful sketch [of him] and think: Will I be a great artist?⁶

Marc’s talents were initially not limited to painting or sketching. One of his teachers in school was also a cantor and he took singing lessons from him. “Why did I sing? Where did I learn that the voice is used not only for shouting and for quarreling with one’s sisters?” He agreed to become a helper to the cantor and on holy days, in the synagogue, they would sing together. So he thought, “I will be a cantor, a singer. I’ll go to the Conservatory.” But in the neighborhood there was also a violinist who, in the evening, would give lessons. So he thought: “Maybe I shall be a violinist; I shall go to the Conservatory.” Occasionally, some of his relatives and neighbors would invite him to dance with his sister – which he liked. So he thought again: “I will be a dancer. I will go to … I don’t know where.” In addition, he had literary talents. In fact, night and day he wrote verses, and people seemed to like them. So, I thought: “I will be a poet; I will go to … I no longer know where to let myself go.” As one can see, Marc from his early years on was a composite person with many talents, worthy of pursuit. As it happened, a signal of his future direction came to him in the form of a placard saying “Penne’s School of Painting” – a signal he decided to follow.⁷

The time at Penne’s (Yehuda Penn’s) art school was difficult but not humanly unrewarding. As Marc writes in his memoir: “I like Penne. I see his wavering silhouette. Often when I think of the deserted streets of my town, I see him now here, now there.” Next to Marc, the school included such future artists as El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. However, after a few years of schooling, he realized that the place – concentrating on portrait painting – did not suit his ambitions, so he left (in 1906). During the last year at the school, Marc befriended a fellow student, Victor Mekler, the son of a Jewish industrialist, who “introduced him to a sophisticated circle of friends” made up mainly of children of professionals and merchants. Among this circle was Greta (later Bella) Rosenfeld, the daughter of a local jeweler. Following a brief courtship, Marc and Bella were engaged in Vitebsk. As he writes in his memoir:

My fiancée’s family argued about me, but morning and night, she brought to my studio sweet cakes from her house, broiled fish, boiled milk, all sorts of decorative materials. I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love and flowers, entered with her. Dressed all in white or all in black, she seemed to float over my canvasses for a long time, guiding my art.⁸

2. St. Petersburg and Paris

A year later (1907), Mekler determined to leave Vitebsk and to move to St. Petersburg to continue his art studies. Chagall decided to join him – although this meant to leave his fiancée behind. Immediately after arriving in the Russian capital, Marc went to take the entrance examination for admission to the prestigious Baron Stieglitz’s School of Arts and Crafts – which then focused on “decorative designs.” He failed the exam. “The studios,” he writes, “copying those long plaster decorative designs looked to me like things in a department store. I thought: these designs have been chosen on purpose to embarrass the Jewish pupils and keep them...