Love & Dread

He's asleep

He's awake.

Right away he's painting

He grabs a church and paints with the church

He grabs a cow and paints with the cow

With a sardine

With heads, hands, knives

He paints with an oxtail. . . .

Parisian Poet Blaise Cendrars was trying to describe Artist Marc Chagall. Hardly anyone else in 1911 thought him worth describing. Paris was just getting used to Les Fauves (see above), and bright young men from all over Europe and the U.S. were there, learning to paint in the new ways. But Chagall did not want to learn anything.

"Primitive art," explained Chagall, "already had a technical perfection toward which the present generation is striving, now playing tricks of sleight of hand, now falling into stylization. I compare .this formal baggage to the Pope of Rome sumptuously vested beside Christ naked, or to the lavishly decorated church beside prayer in the open fields."

Empty Space. Chagall has painted with the eyes (but not the hand) of a child ever since. Although his visions were primitive-on-purpose, they came out far from stark. His colors were as successfully sumptuous as the most lavish ecclesiastical or imperial vestments, and for decoration he assembled a set of props (candles, roosters, violins), to "fill up the empty space in my canvas as the structure of my picture requires . . . and according to my humor."

Chagall's peculiarly repetitive "humor" had its roots in Vitebsk, Russia. Under the Czars, no Jew could forget the burden of dread which Christian Europe forced on his race. But Chagall's family were Hasideans, who rebelled against the sober intellectualism of the Talmudists. They taught young Marc that the essence of religion was love, and that sorrow could only cloud communication with God.

Between Heaven & Earth. Love and dread were to become the only consistently recognizable elements in Chagall's work. His candles stood for weddings--or funerals. His roosters crowed for joy--or looked monstrously fierce. But the most confusing thing about Chagall was that all of his few symbols hung somewhere between Heaven and Earth. Cows jumped over housetops, and fiddlers played in the sky. Like Einstein, Chagall went beyond Newtonian law. As in some Hasidic dances, his whirling, painted figures achieved an ecstasy of mystic levitation--but they never came down.

His Dedicated to My Fiancee (see cut) was once almost rejected by the Parisian Salon des Independants (which supposedly takes anything) as pornographic art. The home-town girl named Bella, to whom the painting was dedicated, saw nothing shocking about it. As his wife, she later appeared in Double Portrait.

Obsessing Images. With a huge retrospective show, Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week crowned Chagall as one of the most important living painters. Said James Johnson Sweeney, Director of the Museum's painting department: "Our debt is to an artist who has brought poetry back into painting. . . ."

Chagall has no words to account for his pictures. Says he: "They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me. The theories which I would make up to explain myself, and those which others elaborate in connection with my work are nonsense."

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