The Wanderer

Until recently only three painters rated special rooms in Paris' National Museum of Modern Art. They were Matisse, Braque and Picasso. Last week 60-year-old, Russian-born Marc Chagall had his own room too, filled with the strange gravity-defying pictures he has been painting for the past 40 years.

The room may be the closest thing to a permanent home that wispy-haired little Painter Chagall will ever know. Since 1910, when he left Russia and its harrowing threat of pogroms for Paris, he had never really settled down. Haunted by his memories and searching for escape, he found it only in his unearthly, richly colored paintings, more like astral visions than the real world, with ghostly men & women, wandering violins, fish, cows and roosters floating across them like derelict balloons.

Savage Beasts. In those days, Chagall walked the streets from noon to nightfall in search of subjects to paint. Back in his room he worked under a single light until, as he wrote, "the petrol lamp outside in the street clashed with the blue of the predawn sky." But few Parisians paid Chagall's nightmarish canvases much heed. Just before the Russian Revolution he returned to Vitebsk, where he founded a school of fine arts.

From Vitebsk he moved to Moscow where he did murals and sets for the new Jewish Theater. Finally, after a short stopover in Berlin, he returned to Paris. There his work slowly began winning recognition, but with the beginning of World War II he pulled up roots once more, moved with his wife and daughter to Manhattan.

After the war he settled in a tumble-down villa in a Parisian suburb where to him, as always, the world still seemed as mysterious and insubstantial as that of his paintings. When visitors came he would point to the tangled grass and thickets which surrounded the house and mutter: "I have never explored this land. There must be savage beasts in there." Like the figures in his paintings he was hard to pin down. "It troubles me to talk about my painting," he says. "My mother used to tell me, 'Of God, sprich nicht.' It is the same with art."

Floating Men. Chagall admits his similarity to his floating men: "The man in the air . . . used to be partially me. Now it's entirely me. I'm not fixed any place. I have no place of my own."

As if to prove it last week he was turning his back on his new-found museum home, closing his villa and moving south to the Midi. Like Picasso he had become interested in making pottery. "When I touched the soil, I felt a shock. The earth of the Midi is made for ceramics." He is also considering a commission to decorate a Roman Catholic chapel at Vence near the one that Fellow Artist Matisse (TIME, Oct. 24) is now designing.

Speaking of his new project, Wanderer Chagall says: "It will take some time before my soul will be entirely tranquil." Said daughter Ida, who has shared most of his travels with him: "It will never be entirely tranquil."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.