Marc Chagall (Jewish Encounters Series) - Hardcover

Wilson, Jonathan

 
9780805242010: Marc Chagall (Jewish Encounters Series)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0805242015 ISBN 13: 9780805242010
Verlag: Schocken, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall’s work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to “narrate” the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice.

Wilson brilliantly demonstrates how Marc Chagall’s life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in New York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present.

Wilson’s portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe–showing us how Chagall is the emblematic Jewish artist of the twentieth century.

Visit nextbook.org/chagall for a virtual museum of Chagall images.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jonathan Wilson is the author of A Palestine Affair, The Hiding Room, Schoom, and An Ambulance Is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble; and of two critical studies of the fiction of Saul Bellow. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. A professor of English at Tufts University, he lives with his family in Newton, Massachusetts.

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Chapter One: Vitebsk

Marc Chagall was born Moishe (Movcha) Shagal in the run-down Pestkovatik neighborhood of the Belorussian town of Vitebsk (population 65,000) on July 6 (not July 7 as he claimed—he preferred the number 7) in 1887. He was born dead and brought to life by someone who speedily dipped him in a pail filled with cool water. Not far away a fire raced through the town, destroying 125 shops, 268 wooden houses, and 16 other buildings. Fire and water: a sturdy elemental beginning for a painter.

If baby Shagal’s startled eyes had been able to take in his surroundings, or if his body had been able to levitate with the ease of the figures in his adult paintings, he would have seen close to his birthplace the walls of both the town’s local prison and its lunatic asylum. Already in place too, as if waiting for him, were the neighborhood rooftops on Pokrowskaya Street, the animals in the street, the onion-domed churches, Torah-clutching rabbis, women with baskets, men burdened with the yoke not of the Torah but of milk-filled buckets, and perhaps even someone playing a fiddle and leading a wedding procession.

The characters, creatures, and buildings to be found on the outskirts of Vitebsk, where most of its Jewish population lived, and that were to become Chagall’s obsessive lifelong subject, were not, however, the whole story of the town. For Chagall frequently chose to collapse broad Vitebsk where it sat on the confluence of the Vitba and Dvina rivers into a narrow frame and reconstruct it in his memory as a landlocked shtetl, a small Jewish village more like Lyosno, some thirty miles away, where his maternal grandparents lived.

The Vitebsk that Chagall’s paintings gave the world has been accepted as a representation of a lost Jewish world that can be happily regarded with nostalgia. And indeed it is. But a visitor in 1887 alighting in Vitebsk from a train en route from Odessa or Kiev to St. Petersburg, or from Riga on the way to Moscow, would have searched long and hard for a fiddler on the roof. Instead, he or she would have seen the impressive Uspensky Cathedral, or the new railway bridge, and, if in search of music, might have headed for one of the city’s other imposing buildings that functioned as temporary homes for the visiting theater companies or famous musicians who gave concerts there.

Sometimes these local Vitebsk landmarks appear in Chagall’s art (as in Double Portrait with Wineglass, 1917–18), but they are not its important symbolic sites. Throughout his painting career Chagall insistently brought the world of big history to the little streets of his old neighborhood as he knew it in early childhood: the Holocaust takes place on the streets where Chagall grew up, and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallith (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there. If he is not bringing history to Vitebsk then Chagall is carrying Vitebsk with him, as in a suitcase of the mind, wherever he goes. He has only to unpack his imagination, peer out of his window in Paris, and there are Pestkovatik’s tiny houses, shops, and stiebls (small, one-room synagogues) lining up sideways under the Eiffel Tower.

Much of what we know of Chagall’s early life is to be discovered in his memoir My Life, written when Chagall was only thirty-five during a tumultuous year that he spent in Moscow from 1921 to 1922. Like Chagall’s paintings, however (and the text is accompanied by a number of Chagall’s etchings and drypoints), his writing tends toward the ahistorical, and proceeds via anecdote and association. There are no dates to set parameters for the reader; instead there are charged descriptions of individuals, rhetorical flourishes, lyric passages, sentimentalized recollections, and a considerable amount of self-aggrandizement. The latter is quite understandable for an artist with a singular and established reputation who had, at his time of writing, been packed off by the local Soviet Narkompross (People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment) to teach drawing to two colonies of war orphans in Malakhovka on the outskirts of Moscow. But I am getting ahead of the story.

“My father’s clothes shone with herring brine,” Chagall writes in My Life; “he lifted heavy barrels and my heart used to twist like a Turkish bagel as I watched him lift those weights and stir the herrings with his frozen hands.” Poor laborers in the herring business worldwide, even those without a heartfelt attachment to the circumscribed rubrics of Hasidic Jewish life, have rarely shown great enthusiasm for the life of high art. Sachar Shagal was no exception. This father of eight had other aspirations for his eldest son along the familiar “paying job” lines. However, when the crunch came and Chagall needed money to enroll in a St. Petersburg art school, Sachar reached deep into his pockets, produced the necessary rubles, and mischievously rolled them under the kitchen table for his son to scramble after. In his memoir Chagall recalls this moment of combined joy and humiliation with a wave of the hand: “I forgive him it was his way of giving.”

As if to confirm this exculpation, Chagall’s 1914 portrait My Father is decidedly empathetic. This watercolor on paper, which presently hangs in St. Petersburg’s Russian Museum, presents a stoop-shouldered figure with trouble in his eyes. He sits in his kitchen, a glass of tea and lumps of sugar on the table before him, a cat and an old babushka to his left. The herring brine shine is not visible on his royal blue jacket or matching cap. In his outfit he resembles Van Gogh’s postman. In the top right-hand corner we can clearly see the bolt on the door. Behind his left shoulder, through a window, sheets are hung out to dry. Chagall’s father was fifty-one and his son twenty-seven when this painting was accomplished. Chagall had already been to Paris, achieved some fame if not fortune, and returned. The father is in a reduced place, and the sense of a life sacrificed to hard labor is palpable. He is similarly downcast in the 1911 pen-and-ink sketch My Father, My Mother and Myself, where, by contrast, Chagall’s mother wears a superb hat and a cheerful smile.

As an accompaniment to his memoir (or perhaps it is really the other way round) numerous paintings and drawings completed by Chagall in his early twenties also tell the story of his childhood in Vitebsk, including Sabbath (1910), Our Dining Room (1911), Village with Water Carriers (1911–12), and The Village Store (1911). But perhaps none of them unlock the past with such a ripple effect as The Dead Man (1908). Chagall executed this important painting when he was a twenty-one-year-old student in Leon Bakst’s class at the Zvantseva Academy in St. Petersburg.

The specific inspiration for The Dead Man is a memory of childhood that Chagall records in My Life. “Suddenly . . .  well before dawn . . . a woman, alone, running through deserted streets.” The woman’s husband is dying and she implores the neighbors, who include young Chagall, to save him. “The light from the yellow candles, the color of that face, barely dead . . . The dead man . . . is already laid out on the floor, his face illumined by six candles.”

From a biographical rather than a pictorial point of view, what intrigues in this painting are its departures from Chagall’s inspirational memory. In The Dead Man “deserted streets” are no longer deserted. Instead we see, in addition to the screaming woman, not only the body laid out but also a preoccupied street sweeper (grim reaper?) plying his predawn trade. Most significantly,...

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Verlag
Schocken
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0805242015
ISBN 13 
9780805242010
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
256
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