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Sometimes it doesn't pay to be too popular. By the time of his death in
1985, at age 97, Marc Chagall was suburbia's favorite genius. He offered
modernism without tears, without the headaches of Cubism or the thin air of
abstraction. For middle-class Jews, he was also the chronicler of the world
of their fathers, the poet of that lost, enchanted universe. By the
mid-1960s, when Fiddler on the Roof took its title from one of Chagall's
best-known motifs, his popular reputation was at its peak. But in the eyes
of an art world that had always been a little unconvinced by him, he had
become the middlebrow modernist, the go-to guy for shopworn lyricism, bathos
and kitsch.

Can this reputation be saved? You bet it can. That is what shows like the
voluptuous Chagall retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
are for, to remind us that Chagall's best work is too powerful to be buried
under the assembly-line charm of his later output. (And perhaps also to
bring in the crowds.) Did he oversupply the world with purple cows? He did.
But he was also a great and original artist, one who could produce work as
deeply gratifying as any Bonnard, as inventive as any wriggle by Miro.

Chagall's lifelong touchstone was Vitebsk, the Belarusian village where he
was born in 1887. His parents were Yiddish-speaking Hasidim, descended from
a culture suspicious of imagery but possessing a long tradition of mysticism
and of the spiritual ecstasy that courses through his art. In My Life, the
lovely but unreliable memoir that he wrote when he was just 35, Chagall
recalls how his family used painted canvases to protect the wooden floors of
their house. "My sisters," he observes dryly, "thought pictures were made
expressly for that purpose."

Chagall had other purposes in mind. For him pictures were made so that
lovers could fly and cows could hang upside down in the air, so that logic
and gravity could give way to the golden disorder of fantasy. On those
canvases he also made a peaceable kingdom in which men and beasts lived
together in a mystical communion, an amalgamation of the human and the
creaturely as strange and intimate as anything in Ovid.

In the 1920s the Surrealists attempted to claim him as a forebear. Chagall
demurred. He wanted no part of the Surrealist notion that art flowed from
the dictates of the unconscious. What Chagall believed was that art flowed
from his whole self, from his memories and desires. Let the world fly apart
under his brush; he was always the master of his own revels.

In particular the revels of romance. Next to Jewish life, his great topic
was love, especially for Bella, the woman he married in 1915. In Lovers in
the Red Sky, painted in 1950, six years after her death, a couple flies
together through the air, as Chagall and Bella had done in so many of his
other paintings. Those airborne pairs are his loveliest contribution to
Western imagery, a secular version of Christianity's great floating figures,
the Ascension of Christ and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

As a Jew in Christian Europe, Chagall was a natural-born alien. So it's no
surprise that he was never comfortable within the confines of any of the
European "isms." He arrived in Paris for the first time in 1910, when the
avant-garde was still working under the spell of Cubism. Chagall took from
it only what he could use, mostly the possibilities that Cubist fracturing
offered as a way to lightly structure the space in which his figures moved.
As for the more dedicated Cubists around him in the Paris art world, he
wrote, "Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular
tables!"

What genuinely excited him was the roaring palette of the
Post-Impressionists, the way that Gauguin or Van Gogh pumped color to convey
feeling, without regard to whether a green face had ever been green in
reality. This turned the key in Chagall's mind. Whole floods of vermillion
and cobalt and purple came forward. It was this discovery he had in mind
when he wrote, "I brought my objects with me from Russia. Paris shed its
light on them."

In 1914 Chagall returned to Belarus for what he thought would be a brief
visit, only to be trapped there for eight years by war and revolution. Named
by the Soviets as arts commissar for Vitebsk, he headed for a time the
People's School of Art, where the faculty included the avant-gardists
Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Chagall's vision of a school that would
encourage every tendency ran afoul of Malevich's exclusive faith in
abstraction. In time Malevich and his followers seized the place in the name
of Suprematism and its militant modernism.

Increasingly disillusioned by Soviet rule after moving to Moscow in 1920,
Chagall left Russia in 1923. But before he did, he produced one of the high
points of this show: a massive canvas that rarely leaves Moscow,
Introduction to the Jewish Theatre. Created by Chagall to decorate that
city's 90-seat State Jewish Chamber Theater, it was also a manifesto of his
deliberately impure aesthetic, in which broad bands of color derived plainly
from Suprematism are the backdrop — but only the backdrop — for resolutely
nonabstract acrobats and livestock. In the lower right-hand corner, just
above Chagall's signature, a man urinates directly into the eye of a pig. A
parting shot at the Gentile Malevich? Some scholars think so.

It was Chagall who introduced Jewish life into the mainstream of Western
art. Proclaiming the glories of his people by way of his exalted memories,
he would become the master poet of the Jewish world, the Walt Whitman of the
shtetl. But all his life he also adapted Christian imagery to his own
purposes. (Remember those flying lovers?) He returned again and again to the
Crucifixion but in versions in which Christ is plainly an executed Jew, his
loins wrapped in a blue-striped Jewish prayer shawl. By the late 1930s, in
paintings like White Crucifixion, Chagall used Golgotha as a sign for the
escalating pain of European Jews.

But even in the face of calamity, he went on making love scenes, colored
sometimes by the knowledge that man is a beast in all senses. In 1939, one
year after White Crucifixion, he completed Midsummer Night's Dream, in which
a woman uses her blue fan to deflect the ardor of a goat-ass who is but also
is not Shakespeare's comic Bottom. We are born partly of the animal world,
says Chagall, but sometimes we transform our base impulses into gold.

Source: Time -Online Edition

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