ART: Unrealist

A cosmopolitan crowd of Manhattan art-lovers trampled each other’s elegant toes last week to see an exhibit of paintings by Marc Chagall, one of the least known (in the U.S.) of important modernist painters, the man for whom the word surrealist was first coined.

The show, held at Manhattan’s Pierre Matisse Gallery (owned by the son of Painter Henri Matisse), contained 16 canvases. First impression of so much Chagall in one room was like falling through space closely pursued by open cans of the three primary colors. Gradually the chromatic confusion resolved itself into nine paintings of Russian village life in Unoccupied France (painted after the Nazi invasion); three scenes of Russian village life in Connecticut (painted since Chagall’s arrival in the U.S. last year); one scene of Russian village life in Russia; and one study of a cow in a high state of discoloration, the same animal Chagall painted 30 years ago from something he thought he saw in Paris. Remarkable for Chagall was the sensitive draughtsmanship of a new Descent from the Cross.

But exhibit No. 1 was Chagall’s 5½ ft. by 10 ft. Revolution, which was having its first showing. Gallerygoers, who clustered around this movable mural, saw Artist Chagall’s mystical interpretation of what is going on in the world. Out of its upper right hand corner shaggy-haired Chagall gazed poker-faced at the weird doings below.

To most gallerygoers the art of Marc Chagall has always been a good deal of a riddle. The puzzle began when Painter Chagall rushed from St. Petersburg to Paris with a canvas showing a decapitated milkmaid floating in an emetic sky while a pink cow was suckled by a pair of pea-green apes on a Russian rooftop. Paris was baffled. Even the Left Bank was slow to understand that Painter Chagall’s graphic defiance of the laws of physics and biology was the work of a deeply religious, idealistic young Jew who was merely recreating from his imagination the folk tales he had heard as a boy in his native Russia. But an important artistic event had occurred—the modern art worlds of Eastern and Western Europe had met.

Later Chagall went to Berlin, where he helped formulate the principles of Expressionism, refusing to identify himself with the resultant school. Chagall then proceeded to Russia, where he painted murals for Moscow’s Jewish Kamerny Theater and taught art in his native Vitebsk. In 1922 he returned to Paris to become a naturalized Frenchman. “I owe all that I have achieved,” he once wrote, “to Paris, to France.” (Chagall is about as French as borsch.)

Today Marc Chagall says of surrealism “Not for me.” A hater of realism as well, he refuses to be joined by any artistic school. He will not even discuss his own work. “Monsieur,” he says in his dense Vitebsk French (he speaks no English), “l’art est comme l’amour. If your wife is ugly, you do not talk about her looks. If she is beautiful, they speak for both her and you.”