On the occasion of the Marc Chagall exhibition at the Grand Palais, Itzhak Goldberg here delivers his personal lexicon for approaching Chagall’s work — the indispensable key words for understanding the universe of this born storyteller, where Yiddish traditions, Russian folk art, and the world of the avant-garde mingle felicitously.
Nothing prevents us from loving Chagall, even if we are ignorant of Judaic tradition or folklore. In a period when painting proclaims the descriptive independence of color and form, the painter’s poetic imagination, which distances him from all imitation, the chromatic richness of his pictorial universe, his work on lightness and transparencies, assure Chagall a place of choice in the pantheon of modernity. One could even claim that any interpretation of Chagall’s work in the light of his origins is reductive, for it fails to take account of contemporary art’s aspiration to represent the universal. Chagall’s personal itinerary between 1910 and 1914 (Russia, France, Germany) reflects this tendency perfectly. The painter, moreover, never disavowed his debt to the Parisian avant-garde and its various expressions (Fauvism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism).
Nevertheless, Chagall’s enthusiasm before the formal inventions of his time remains measured: “I looked at them sideways and thought: let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables,” he writes in his memoirs. For him, forms set free, colors that no longer respect the appearances of nature, are, in spite of everything and above all, tools in the service of his thematic matter, a thematic matter he draws from his own culture. In a pictorial universe where the characters renounce the principles of gravitation and practice the laws of spiritual weightlessness, the painter, for his part, never renounces his roots. The Chagallian work is in search of a “Judeo-universal” language: accessible to an uninitiated gaze, it always harbors a coded language.
His fables sketch a Jewish village, anchored in its traditions but confronted with a Russian world in transformation. A world where the synagogue rubs shoulders with the bell towers of the churches, where robust peasants are invited by the painter to a wedding ceremony celebrated according to the Hebraic rites. Often enigmatic visions, where Yiddish culture and Russian folk art, Judaism and Christianity, the rational and the absurd, the intimate and the infinite, the near and the far, the visible and the visionary mingle. In Chagall’s universe time is labile, distance modulable at will, reality extensible, the imaginary concrete. “Now the candle rises toward the moon, now the moon descends in flight toward our arms”; this sentence of the painter’s condenses all the poetry of his art.
Self-Portrait (with Seven Fingers)
Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: but come, do you find something abnormal in it? Have you taken a good look at yourself? Besides, everyone will tell you, it is impossible to paint, as Chagall does, the seven colors of the rainbow with barely five fingers.
Other self-portraits will follow; with Anywhere Out of the World, 1915, the painter, whom the war prevents from returning to Paris, shows himself against a background of Vitebsk, with his head cut in two, as though divided between these two places. Elsewhere, literally transported by his love for Bella, his young wife, he has himself carried on his own shoulders, a glass of red wine in hand. Drunk on love or on painting? Chagall, for his part, sees no difference, for “lovers are forms, forms are lovers.”
Avant-garde
Chagall has two rendezvous with the avant-garde. The first, spectacular, on his arrival in Paris, or more precisely at La Ruche, a cluster of artists’ studios that became mythical, which sheltered numerous representatives of what would later be called the École de Paris (Soutine, Archipenko, Zadkine). There, suddenly, comes the shock procured by the new tendencies, which he assimilates with a dizzying rapidity: Fauvism, Cubism, Orphism, Futurism. From this highly explosive cocktail the painter fabricates his own style and his particular universe of forms. As the cantor of modernity, Apollinaire, puts it: he is encumbered by no system.
The second encounter takes place a few years later, in Russia. Enthused by the perspectives opened by the revolution, Chagall shares with other artists the hope (the illusion?) that the political avant-garde goes hand in hand with the artistic one. Recognized by the authorities, he is named director of the School of Fine Arts in his native town, Vitebsk. Very open-minded, he invites other artists to teach there, among them Malevich. The latter shows himself hostile to Chagall and rapidly imposes his style, Suprematism, a form of radical geometric abstraction. In 1920, faced with this open rivalry, the painter gives up and leaves Vitebsk. The school, henceforth, will bear the title Suprematist Academy. Chagall, for his part, for better or for worse, will from then on follow only his own style in all its evolutions.
Bella
Met in 1909, Bella becomes for Chagall the equivalent of Nadja for Breton. Model and muse at once, this young woman recurs in numerous canvases. Still reserved, in profile, as though keeping her distance (we are only in 1909, come now) in My Fiancée with White Gloves. Much closer to the painter, who is already taking flight, in 1915, the date of the couple’s reunion in Vitebsk (The Birthday). It is also the year of the marriage and the point of departure of a long series of double portraits, situated most often in the heavens (Over the Town, 1914–1918). This flight, literally a transport of love, is marvelously recounted by Bella herself: “suddenly, you lift me from the ground and you yourself take me up in your élan… Your head is turned and you turn mine too.” Imaged declarations of love, dirigible messages borne by the clouds — several of these paintings are gathered under the title Dedicated to My Wife. Love of art or avowal of the supernatural power of love? Do we even know that the painter’s name, Chagall, means in Hebrew to make love?
Bestiary
Female cow to the bull, preferably red, but which can accommodate itself to the color green. A domestic animal, easily recognizable in Chagall by its presence on the roofs of the houses in the villages (To Russia, Asses and Others, 1911). Certainly, spectators ignorant of peasant life in Russia experience a certain astonishment before this representation. We refer them to the famous Jewish proverb: “How to milk a cow when you’ve left the bucket on the roof?” Logical, no?
However, if the cow seems particularly privileged in Chagall, who “takes a cow and paints with a cow” (Blaise Cendrars), other animals (rooster or ram, ass or goat) form part of the painted bestiary. This is because, like “the Hasid, who maintains bonds of complicity with the whole of creation, beginning with the animal kingdom” (Michel Makarius), the artist often makes use of four-legged characters for his fables and metaphors.
Collage
To employ the term collage for Chagall’s plastic production verges on pleonasm. Certainly, properly speaking, the artist makes little use of this technique inaugurated by the Cubists, which introduces non-artistic materials into the space of the canvas. Apart from the small collages fabricated very late, the rare ones we know of are made essentially from letters slipped onto the surface of the works.
However, the true collage in Chagall is the one that may be called visual, imaged, practiced the moment he touches the brush. His images are founded on the principle of fragmentation and hybridization, where beings, animals, and objects, burst apart and intermingled, form a puzzle, a kaleidoscope saturated with colors, of which the painter alone (and even then) knows the reasons and the outcomes. These heteroclite “representations,” these “reconciled extremes” (Claude Esteban), associate with a natural ease the pure and the impure, the sacred and the profane, or — to remain within Chagallian culture — the kosher and the non-kosher. Better still, they ignore the principle of contradiction, for they follow involuntarily (or not) the form of exchange practiced by the Hasidim: “They spoke of high and very high things, but also of the events of the day. Of high things, they spoke as of an event of here below, that would happen in their neighborhood, and of the events of here below, as though they were woven of a celestial fabric” (Martin Buber).
Hasidism
A spiritual and popular movement born in the eighteenth century in Eastern Europe. Contrary to the rationalism of official Judaism, Hasidism is founded on the domination of the magical and supernatural element, on mystical faith. Without formally adhering to this current, Chagall is drawn to its pantheist conception, to its fables and its proverbs, and above all to its “affirmation of joy as the supreme meaning of existence” (Kamenski). The enchantment that emanates from the scenes of daily life painted by Chagall, the feeling of ecstasy that makes his characters “lose their heads,” the imaginary bestiary, the importance of the feast, of music, are the pictorial translation of this doctrine that establishes between man and God a relationship of familiarity, even of conviviality. “God is present in the clouds or behind the cobbler’s house,” writes Chagall.
Icon
Religious paintings, executed on wooden panels, form part of Chagall’s cultural landscape throughout his sojourn in Russia. In the churches or at the museum of Saint Petersburg, these images leave a profound impression on the painter. The icons prefigure Chagall’s art, for they do not seek to represent a universe that refers to physical space but a supernatural world. The reality reconstructed by Chagall’s imagination, with its inverted perspectives, its subjective proportions, its chromatic richness, draws near to the spiritual world of the icon. Finally, may God forgive him, Chagall permits himself eccentricities, like those virgins visibly already visited by the Holy Spirit.
Jewish Iconography?
A painting of 1914 has as its subtitle The Rabbi with the Lemon. In reality, the title is inexact. Inspired by the feast of Sukkot (or of Tabernacles), which commemorates the crossing of the desert by the Hebrews, the image presents a rabbi with a severe face, clad in the tallith, with the accessories of the rite: the palm and the citron, a sort of large inedible lemon. However, perched on the rabbi’s head, his miniature double tips the gravity over into a grotesque that points up the absurdity of the celebration, in the midst of the Eastern European winter, of a ritual that requires the consumption of fruits of the Promised Land. A surreality where the relations of the Jews of the diaspora with time and space situate themselves between the real and the imaginary. But this splayed stride, of an absolute lightness, is also the very image of a work that holds itself in an in-between.
Luftmensch
Literally, “the man of the air.” It is the man who floats in the void, above the tones, without ever touching the ground; “one walks celestial, set apart from earth” Cocteau might have said of this pedestrian of the air who sails among the stars. A flying character who, in Chagall, is at once an anti-hero and a figure of style. This pictorial invention finds its source in the Yiddish language and literature. The best-known example is Menachem Mendel, the work of Sholem Aleichem, a pioneer of this literature. Its principal actor is a perpetual dreamer, more familiar with the Bible than with real life, closer to Don Quixote than to Sancho Panza, and who firmly believes that the miracle is far more concrete than reality. Like the Wandering Jew, in the image of a violinist who would have replaced his violin with a bundle, the Luftmensch is the allegory of a people constrained to unstable equilibrium and whose exile is at once real and metaphysical. An absurd traveler, despite himself in history but, thank God, outside time, he could be a Woody Allen in free flight over Vitebsk. But it is the painter himself, this smuggler of dreams, who remains the best example of the Luftmensch: “I was born, one might say, between heaven and earth,” he writes.
Representation
In Chagall’s case, it is rather the prohibition of representation that must be spoken of. His Jewish origins oblige him to create a plastic language that accommodates itself to this prohibition imposed by the Old Testament. But, writes Franz Meyer, the prohibition of images tended essentially to prevent the representation of exterior reality from weakening interior reality. Chagall, for his part, does not subordinate his painting to the real but substitutes for it a supernatural vision. What is more, if the Old Testament taboo concerns every form of representation, it applies particularly to that of human beings, since God created man in His image. The choice of abstraction would have constituted an ideal solution.
But Chagall resists non-figuration. He will circumvent the difficulty by taking the biblical text to the letter, where it is above all a question of “the sculpted image.” His beings of cloud, with heads detached or inverted, deformed and nonetheless recognizable, escape all petrification and evolve in a universe that ignores the laws of gravity: “I made paintings upside down. I cut off heads and broke characters into pieces that, in my paintings, flew through the air.” If the man of whom the Bible speaks is formed of dust or of earth, Chagall’s man is made from the “stuff of dreams.”
Christian Thematic
The Holy Family is a familiar subject, you think? In 1910, when Chagall broaches this highly coded theme, he gives it a strange interpretation. The child, placed not on the knees of Mary but on those of Joseph, is bearded. John the Baptist, off to the side, has replaced the traditional lamb with a pig. This “recycling” of the usual iconography, like the representation of Christ clad in the tallith, the prayer shawl (White Crucifixion, 1938), turns the dogma to derision. To the Christian world that kneels before the divine child, the artist merely recalls his hardly “Catholic” origins. The incongruous presence of the beard evokes the Yiddish saying according to which every Jewish child is born old, while the pig, symbol of impurity according to Hebraic tradition, forms a counterpoint with the paschal lamb. Irreverent, Chagall? Certainly. But no more so than when he represents a respectable rabbi calmly taking his snuff during a religious reading. In Chagall’s inverted world, the daily gesture often takes on an unreal character, while the miracle sets its feet on the ground. The artist keeps, faced with religious representation, a freedom in which the offensive sarcasm often turns to self-derision.
Vitebsk(s)
If Chagall’s native town is declined in the plural, it is because there exist two quite distinct Vitebsks. The first incarnates the shtetl, that typical Jewish village folded back on its traditions and which never leaves the artist’s pictorial universe. The painter draws up a veritable typology of its inhabitants: artisans and merchants, peddlers or klezmers, rabbis or beggars, all against a background strewn with synagogues and wooden houses. An isolated world, almost an island, but where churches with their bulbous bell towers, outlined in the background, do not take long to recall the weight of the dominant, often menacing, culture of Russian Orthodoxy.
Vitebsk, similar to so many other shtetlech in Eastern Europe, an inexhaustible source of reminiscences of Jewish and Russian culture for Chagall, transforms itself nonetheless into an idealized, magical place as soon as the painter moves away from it. From his beginnings, as Pierre Schneider remarks, the artist finds himself before an apparently insoluble dilemma: to paint requires that he break with Vitebsk, but to renounce painting Vitebsk would be to deprive himself of his reason for practicing painting.
In fact, it was practically unthinkable to exercise an artistic profession in a traditional Jewish milieu, and Chagall, as though pushed by destiny, finds himself after a long journey in Paris, capital of Europe. But the pictorial liberation that follows this encounter with the international avant-garde remains inseparable from the nostalgia that invades the painter: “it seems to me that, far from the homeland, I was closer to it than many people who lived there.” Thus, it seems that Chagall never painted Vitebsk so lovingly as from a distance, when the time of separation makes him forget both the difficulties of exercising his profession there and the daily reality, often gray. As in a rearview mirror, the image, reflected before us, is in reality “behind,” in that past toward which Chagall, constrained to perpetual displacements, often turns his gaze with nostalgia. Dematerialized, the town takes on shimmering colors and floats on a cloud (Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers). In short, Chagall transfigures the real and invents a celestial Vitebsk. This situation of being torn between the present and the past, between here and over there, is perfectly illustrated with Paris Through the Window, 1913, where the painter, like Janus, represents himself with a double-faced head, one turned toward Paris and the other toward an elsewhere, outside the canvas. “There was a time when I had two heads,” says the artist. Chagall, or schizophrenic painting?
Yiddish
Originally, Yiddish is a dialect formed from German, with a strong proportion of Hebrew words, spoken by the whole of the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This dialect progressively welcomes other languages, which it mixes into a savory cocktail of witticisms, of imaged hyperboles. The frequency of the play on words, of the double-edged expression, of the euphemism, and of the allusion is explained by the necessity of defending oneself from a milieu that was very often hostile to the Jewish community. Yiddish is a contraband language, a way of saying forbidden things with permitted words. Chagall’s images are profoundly rooted in this language and, like it, at once extremely simple and terribly elusive.
Yiddish is far more than a source of inspiration; it is a reservoir of proverbs that the painter exploits in mischievous pictorial translations. This language of métissage, Chagall’s mother tongue, also serves, by its structure, as a metaphor for the painter’s art. The collage of different religions and various cultures, the borrowings from various avant-garde tendencies, are in the image of a language that has made tamed heterogeneity its basic principle.
Theater
Together with literature, it is the theater that lies at the heart of the renewal of Jewish culture in Russia. But before executing his masterpieces for the “Jewish Chamber Theater” of Moscow, Chagall, as befits a creator of fables, is offered the chance to make other sets, in 1920, for Gogol’s The Government Inspector (Satirical Revolutionary Theater) and for Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World (Stanislavski Theater). This choice owes nothing to chance, for one need only see the maquette made for Synge’s play to observe that the Playboy slips quite naturally into the skin of the Luftmensch. The two projects, however, are refused.
It is then that the set of the “Jewish Theater” is entrusted to Chagall. Composed from nine monumental canvases that would cover the whole of the hall (curtain, walls, and ceiling), this gigantic “fresco” would be executed over two months of continuous and feverish effort. The various panels offer a vast panorama of traditional Jewish iconography, transformed and sublimated by the artist. The latter defines his work as an occasion to “overturn the old Jewish theater, its psychological naturalism, its glued-on beards.” Nicknamed “Chagall’s Box,” it is above all a total work of art, an autonomous universe in which the spectator feels himself immediately immersed.
(An extended version of this lexicon is published in Beaux Arts.)