Marc Chagall - Vitebsk -París -New York E-Book

Mikhaïl Guerman

• Herausgeber: Parkstone International
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 269

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Chagall loved blue. “The blue of the sky which ceaselessly combats the clouds which pass, which pass…” (Baudelaire). Marc Chagall’s journey began in his native Russia and concluded with his Parisian triumph, the extraordinary ceiling of the Paris Opera House, commissioned by André Malraux. On the way, he embraced the spirit of the twentieth century without ever disowning his Jewish-Russian origins. This work follows the path of the artist through his early works, his discovery of the United States and his passion for France. Marc Chagall, unaffiliated with any movement but influenced by his encounters with Bakst, Matisse and Picasso, remains, undeniably, the painter of poetry.

Leseprobe

MIKHAIL GUERMAN - SYLVIE FORESTIER

DONALD WIGAL

Text: Mikhail Guerman, Sylvie Forestier and Donald Wigal

© Confidential Concepts, Worldwide, USA

© Parkstone Press USA, New York

© Marc Chagall Estate, Artists Rights Society, New York, USA/ ADAGP, Paris

© Image Barwww.image-bar.com

ISBN: 978-1-64461-821-9

All rights reserved.

No parts of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification.

Contents

The Land of my Heart…

The Russian Period

The Symbolism

Chagall and the Theatre

Chagall and America

Life after Bella

Chronology

List of Illustrations

Notes

The Land of my Heart…

Through one of those curious reversals of fate, one more exile has regained his native land. Since the exhibition of his work at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow in 1987, which gave rise to an extraordinary popular fervour, Marc Chagall has experienced a second birth.

Here we have a painter, perhaps the most unusual painter of the twentieth century, who at last attained the object of his inner quest: the love of his native Russia. Thus, the hope expressed in the last lines of My Life, the autobiographical narrative that the painter broke off in 1922 when he left for the West – “perhaps Europe will love me and, along with her, my Russia” – has been fulfilled.

A confirmation of this is pr-ovided today by the retrospective tendency in his homeland --which, beyond the natural re-absorption of the artist into the national culture, also testifies to a genuine interest, an attempt at analysis, an original viewpoint that enriches our study of Chagall.

Contrary to what one might think, this study is still dogged by uncertainties in terms of historical fact. As early as 1961, in what is still the main work of reference[1], Franz Meyer emphasised the point that even the establishment of, for example, a chronology of the artist’s works, is problematic.

In fact, Chagall refused to date his paintings or dated them a posteriori. A good number of his paintings are therefore dated only approximately and to this we must add the problems caused to Western analysts by the absence of comparative sources and, very often, by a poor knowledge of the Russian language.

Therefore, we can only welcome such recent works as that of Jean-Claude Marcadé[2] who, following the pioneers Camilla Gray[3] and Valentina Vassutinsky-Marcadé[4], has underlined the importance of the original source – Russian culture – for Chagall’s work.

One must rejoice even more in the publications of contemporary art historians such as Alexander Kamensky[5] and Mikhail Guerman with whom we now have the honour and pleasure of collaborating.

Yet, Marc Chagall has inspired a prolific amount of literature. The great names of our time have written about his work: from the first serious essay by Efros and Tugendhold, The Art of Marc Chagall[6], published in Moscow in 1918 when Chagall was only thirty-one, to Susan Compton’s erudite and scrupulous catalogue, Chagall[7], which appeared in 1985, the year of the artist’s death.

By the occasion of the exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, there had been no lack of critical studies, but all this does not make easy our perception of Chagall’s art.

The interpretation of his works – now linking him with the Ecole de Paris, now with the Expressionist movement, now with Surrealism – seems to be full of contradictions. Does Chagall totally defy historical or aesthetic analysis? In the absence of reliable documents – some of which were clearly lost as a result of his travels, there is a danger that any analysis may become sterile.

This peculiarity by which the painter’s art seems to resist any attempt at theorisation or even categorisation is moreover reinforced by a complementary observation.

The greatest inspiration, the most perceptive intuitions are nourished by the words of poets or philosophers. Words such as those of Cendrars, Apollinaire, Aragon, Malraux, Maritain or Bachelard…

Words which clearly indicate the difficulties inherent in all attempts at critical discourse, as Aragon himself underlined in 1945: “Each means of expression has its limits, its virtues, its inadequacies.

“Nothing is more arbitrary than to try to substitute the written word for drawing, for painting. That is called Art Criticism, and I cannot in good conscience be guilty of that.”[8] – words that reveal the fundamentally poetic nature of Chagall’s art itself.

Even if the arbitrariness of critical discourse appears to be even more pronounced in the case of Chagall, should we renounce any attempt at clarifying, if not the mystery of his work, then at least his plastic experience and pictorial practice? Should we limit ourselves to a mere lyrical effusion of words with regard to one of the most inventive individuals of our time?

Should we abandon research of his aesthetical order or, on the contrary, persist in believing that his aestheticism lies in the intimate and multiform life of ideas, in their free and at times contradictory exchange? If this last is the necessary prerequisite of all advance in thought, then the critical discourse on Chagall can be enriched by new knowledge contributed by the works in Russian collections that have up to now remained unpublished, by archives that have been brought to light and by the testimony of contemporary historians. The comparison gives us a deeper comprehension of this wild art that exhausts any attempt to tame it despite efforts to conceptualise it. About 150 paintings and graphic pieces by Chagall are analysed here by the sensitive pen of the author.

They were all produced between 1906 – Woman with a Basket – and 1922, the year in which Chagall left Russia for good, with the exception of several later works, Nude Astride a Cockerel (1925), Time is a River without Banks (1930-1939) and Wall-clock with a Blue Wing (1949). The corpus of works presented provides a chronological account of the early period of creativity. The author’s analysis stresses with unquestionable relevance the Russian cultural sources on which Chagall’s art fed.

It reveals the memory mechanism that lies at the heart of the painter’s practice and outlines a major concept. It is tempting to say a major “tempo”, that of time-movement is perceptible in the plastic structure of Chagall’s oeuvre. Thus we can much better understand the vivid flourishing of the artist’s work with its cyclical, apparently repetitive (but why?) character, which might be defined as organic and which calls to mind the ontological meaning of creation itself as set out in the writings of Berdiayev.

This primordial outpouring of creativity that brought the admiration of Cendrars and Apollinaire, this imperious pictorial paganism that dictates its own law to the artist, sets forth an aesthetic and an ethic of predestination that we would like to clarify. It is in the immediacy of Chagall’s pictorial practice, in the immediacy of each creative decision that his own identity lies, that he himself is to be found. This self-revelation is related to us by Chagall himself. The autobiographical My Life, written in Russian, first appeared in 1931 in Paris, in a French translation by Bella Chagall. Providing us with extremely precious evidence of a whole part of the artist’s life, this text – tender, alert and droll – reveals behind its anecdotal nature the fundamental themes of his work and above all, its problematic character. The tale as a whole is not moreover without some evocations of the artist’s biographies studied by Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz[9] who set out a typology.

From the first lines one’s attention is attracted by a singular phrase: “That which first leapt to my eyes was an angel!” Thus, the first hours of Chagall’s life were registered here specifically in visual terms. The tale begins in the tone of a parable and his life-story could not belong to anyone but a painter. Chagall, who recalls the difficulties of his birth, writes: “But above all I was born dead. I did not want to live. Imagine a white bubble which does not want to live. As if it were stuffed with paintings by Chagall.[10]”

The theme of vocation contained within this premonitory dream, the obvious sign of a unique predestination, seems to us to be even more significant in that it determines the events in the artist’s life and gives meaning to his destiny.

Marc Chagall was born into a strict Jewish family for whom the ban on representations of the human figure had the weight of dogma. If one is unaware of the nature of traditional Jewish education, one can hardly imagine the transgressive force, the fever of being, which propelled the young Chagall when he flung himself on the journal Niva (Field) to copy from it a portrait of the composer Rubinstein. This education was based on the historic law of Divine Election and covered the religious side of life only.

Self-portrait with White Collar, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 29.2 x 25.7 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louis E. Stern Collection, Philadelphia.

The Yellow Room, 1911. Oil on canvas, 84 x 112 cm. Private collection.

Sabbath, 1910. Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 94.5 cm. Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

The Small Livingroom, 1908. Oil on cardboard, 22.5 x 29 cm. Private collection, Paris.

The Atelier, 1910. Oil on canvas, 60.4 x 73 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Father, 1914. Tempera on paper mounted on cardboard, 49.4 x 36.8 cm. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

The Street Sweeper, 1913. Gouache on cardboard, 28 x 24 cm. Collection Abraham Tchoudnovski, St. Petersburg.

The Street Sweeper(Janitor with Birds), 1914-1915. Oil on canvas, 49 x 37.5 cm. Kustodiew Gallery, Astrachan.

The transmission to the very core of the Jewish hearth was essentially effected through oral means. Each prayer, each recitation from the Torah or the Talmud imposed on the believer was in a sing-song voice; reading lessons were held out loud; everyday life was given rhythm by the repetitive times of the ritual practice of songs and on the Sabbath day, solemn benedictions. Each Jewish house is a place made holy by the liturgy of the word. The Chagall family belonged to the Hassidic tradition. We should emphasise here that this form of piety – hassid means devout – gives preference to direct contact between the individual and God.

The dialogue which is thus set up between the faithful and Yahweh exists without the mediation of rabbinical pomp and display. It is born directly from everyday ritual and is expressed in the exercise of personal liberty. Hassidism lies outside the scholarly Talmudic culture, the institutional commentary of the synagogue. It was historically found in rural Russian and Polish communities, communities based on the original fundamental nucleus of Jewish society which is, of course, the family.

Chagall’s father, Zakhar, was a pickler at a herring merchant’s. Sensitive, secretive, taciturn, the figure of Zakhar seems to have had the tragic dimension inherent in the destiny of the Jewish people. “Everything in my father seemed to me to be enigma and sadness. An inaccessible image,” Chagall wrote in My Life. On the other hand, his mother, Feyga-Ita, the eldest daughter of a butcher from Liozno, radiated vital energy. The psychological antithesis of their characters can be seen in Chagall’s very first sketches and in his series of etchings produced for Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1923 that were intended to illustrate My Life.

This antithesis, so strongly felt by Chagall, embodies the age-old experience of the whole of Jewish existence: his father and mother, in the very heart of the plastic space of the picture or drawing bring into play not only the specific reality of a memory but also the two contradictory aspects which form Jewish genius and its history – resignation to fate in the acceptance of the will of God, and creative energy bearing hope, in the unshakeable sense of Divine Election.

Marc had one brother and seven sisters: David, of whom he produced some moving portraits but who died in the flower of youth; Anna (Aniuta), Zina, the twins Lisa and Mania, Rosa, Marussia and Rachel, who also died young. If family life was difficult, it was not miserable. It was part of the life of the stedtl, a specifically Jewish cultural reality connected to the social structure of the ghetto. In Vitebsk, this reality fitted into the structure of rural Russian life.

In the late nineteenth century, Vitebsk was still a small town in Byelorussia situated at the confluence of two waterways, the Dvina and the Vitba. Its economy was expanding greatly but despite the arrival of the railway, the station, small industries and the river port, the town still retained the characteristics of a large rural village. While the numerous churches and the Orthodox cathedral gave it a more urban appearance, most of the houses were still of wood and the streets, frozen in winter, running with water in spring, were not yet paved.

Each house, evidence of an economic unity founded on a traditional domestic way of life, had its little garden and poultry-yard. With their wooden fences and multi-coloured decoration, the houses of Vitebsk live on eternally in Chagall’s pictures. The Russian Orthodox and Jewish communities rubbed along side by side without ever coming into conflict. The divisions between the two were more on the social than on the confessional plane.

There was a Jewish middle class made up of rich merchants for whom the process of integration was clearly effected through education. Chagall himself went to the parish school even though the institution did not accept Jewish children.

It was from this childhood experience that the pictorial schemes of Chagall’s plastic vocabulary originate. But the fragments of memory, which we easily identify in concrete objects even in the very first works – the room, the clock, the lamp, the samovar, the Sabbath table, the village street, the house of his birth and its roof, Vitebsk recognisable through the domes of its cathedral – did not crystallise into clearly defined images until after the passage of many years.

It was only in obeying his calling (“Mummy… I would like to be a painter…[11]”), that is to say in tearing himself away from his family and social milieu, that Chagall could evolve his own pictorial language.

A memory metamorphosed into an image will break with everyday realism and express another reality that lies at the basis of its outward forms. Several relevant details about the artist’s life are needed here. Chagall succeeded in persuading his mother to enrol him in the school of drawing and painting of the artist, Pen.

But the methods of training and the laborious copying exercises soon ceased to satisfy the young Chagall. That which he was still seeking confusedly, that which he barely touched upon in his first daring colouristic experiments, had nothing in common with the academic tradition to which Pen adhered.

The painting that Chagall was carrying within himself was poles apart from the representative realism Pen inherited from The Wanderers. Rebelling against all teaching, from 1907 Chagall began to show a precocious capacity for invention – did he not use the colour violet in a way which defied all known laws? – the autodidactic quality which is the mark of true creative spirits.

The painter’s destiny worked itself out in the image of some hero of the great fundamental myths that make up the collective subconscious. It was a destiny shaped through trials of which the most decisive was tearing himself away from the place of his birth. In 1907, accompanied by his friend Viktor Mekler, Chagall left Vitebsk – one of the main symbolic images in his later work – for St. Petersburg.

His departure for St. Petersburg gives rise to several questions. Chagall could in fact have wished to pursue his artistic quest, which was only just beginning, in Moscow. The choice of St. Petersburg is of particular significance. Chagall was conforming above all – without being aware of it – to a tradition stemming from the Renaissance, a tradition which makes travel one of the principal means of any apprenticeship.

Whilst painting is also a craft – despite the romantic revolts, the status of the artist at the dawn of the twentieth century was still not that far from the craftsman’s status it had in the fifteenth century – the social recognition of this status was inevitably dependent on academic training. St. Petersburg, among other things, was the intellectual and artistic centre of imperial Russia.

Much more than continental Moscow, it was a city whose own history was always characterised by an openness towards Western Europe. Through its architecture, its urbanity, its schools and salons, it dispensed a formal and spiritual nourishment that was to enrich the young provincial.

Chagall’s keen gaze sought the least reflections of the transparent light of the north on the surface of the city’s canals. He came to seek St. Petersburg’s excellence. His failure in the entrance examination for the Stieglitz School did not stop him from later joining the one founded by the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, and directed by Nicholas Roerich.

Nicholas Roerich (1874-1947) had taken part in the production of the journal Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), founded in 1898 by Alexander Benois and run until 1904 by Serge Diaghilev. The journal and the artists grouped around it played a decisive role in the general aesthetic debate with which Russia was preoccupied during the first decade of the twentieth century.

Its emblem, a northern eagle drawn by Bakst, formally synthesised the objectives they pursued: to create a new art, original because it drew on Russian heritage, but open to the influence of the West, thus capable of bringing about, in a country that had never known such a thing in its history, a veritable Renaissance. The World of Art preached the doctrine of art for art’s sake. In a certain measure, the inheritor of the theories of Ruskin, which the journal made known to the Russian public, absorbed Symbolism, and the result was indisputably rich. In 1908, Roerich was a famous artist and his work multifarious.

His far from negligible role in the renewal of the decorative and applied arts as preached by The World of Art should not let us forget his work as the designer of numerous sets for theatre and ballet productions. A convinced Slavophile, much like Kandinsky, who undertook extremely detailed ethnographic research, he was in his very essence opposed to The World of Art group, who looked to the West.

My Fiancée in Black Gloves, 1909. Oil on canvas, 88 x 65 cm. Kunstmuseum, Basle.

Bella with a White Collar, 1917. Oil on canvas, 149 x 72 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The Wedding, 1910. Oil on canvas, 99.5 x 188.5 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The Birth, 1911. Oil on canvas, 113.4 x 195.3 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

The Birth, 1910. Oil on canvas, 65 x 89 cm. Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich.

Birth of a Child, 1911. Oil on canvas, 46 x 36 cm. Private collection, Ida Chagall, Basle.

The Canopy, 1912. Gouache on paper, 21.5 x 23.5 cm. Collection Marcus Diener, Basle.

The critical debate between the Westernists and the Slavophiles was one of the major controversies that reverberated through the intellectual history of Russia. In 1909, the controversy was increased twofold through the permanent and symbolic rivalry between St. Petersburg and Moscow. Another journal founded by a Muscovite merchant, Nikolai Riabushinsky, came to take the place of The World of Art, the main participants having left Russia for Western Europe.

Entitled Zolotoye Runo or The Golden Fleece (a militant journal), it asserted freedom of expression in the name of one of the basic ancient myths of ancestral Russia, the incarnation of that fabulous Scythia which Blok extolled in his famous poem. Like The World of Art, The Golden Fleece, which ceased to appear in 1909, contributed to the artistic life of the period in question. It made known to the wider public individuals as diverse as Benois, Bakst (meeting with whom played an important role in Chagall’s life), Roerich, Golovin, Dobuzhinsky, Larionov, and Goncharova.

Numerous French figures also became involved. Charles Morice published a series of articles concerning the new tendencies in French art; Maurice Denis wrote a study on Gauguin and van Gogh; Matisse himself, who found his main collectors in the Russians Shchukin and Morozov, analysed his conception of arts in the essay, A Painter’s Notes[12].

The repercussions of these articles, backed up by a series of exhibitions organised by the journal in 1908, 1909 and 1910, were considerable. Unlike The World of Art, whose aesthetic model was eighteenth-century France (even if its general tendency could actually be linked with the international Art Nouveau), TheGolden Fleece called on Russian artists to create works contemporary in spirit and as a consequence, contributed to the reflection on the idea of modernity which we know was decisive for the evolution of art.

There is no doubt that in St. Petersburg Chagall became aware of the reverberations of the many controversies which were stirring in the realm of painting.

However, the teaching of Roerich, little different from that offered by Pen, disappointed him, and the sturdy exercise of copying seemed to him to be a waste of time. “Two years lost in this school,” he wrote with bitterness. Two years which allowed him, however, to meet his first patron and collector, the lawyer Goldberg, whose Drawing Room and Study (1908) he depicted, and above all his future protector, the influential deputy in the Duma, Maxim Vinaver.

Chagall frequented the intellectual Jewish circles that revolved around Vinaver and that aimed to revive, with the writer Pozner, the critic Sirkin, and Leopold Sev, Vinaver’s brother-in-law, the Jewish journal Voskhod (Renewal), published in Russian.

The participation of the Jewish intelligentsia in the major artistic debate of the time is incontestable. The growing awareness of a specific Jewish cultural identity did not exclude the desire to give it a new dimension of national and international universality. Voskhod was the instrument of this action.

Vinaver and Sev were to open the doors of the famous Zvantseva school for Chagall. This private school had been founded by a rich woman, herself a painter, Yelizaveta Nikolayevna Zvantseva, who after a stay in Paris, decided to develop a new kind of teaching capable of giving young Russian artists the technical means to develop a totally contemporary form of expression, which they lacked.

In St Petersburg, Zvantseva summoned those who were considered to be the greatest artists of the time, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and, above all, Léon (Lev) Bakst. Bakst had acquired international renown in particular through his collaboration with Diaghilev. An elegant portraitist, he also worked in the sphere of the decorative arts, illustrated books, and created brilliant costume and set designs for theatre and ballet.

Thus Bakst worked for Diaghilev and his stars, Fokine, Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky. His reputation was outstanding. Chagall knew this and was profoundly impressed by it, even though the European Bakst, was, like him, a Jew. For Chagall, to enter the Zvantseva school, to approach Bakst, was a mark of privilege.

Here, close to one of his own, he prepared himself to find that other reality which he was pursuing, which he carried within him, and which he sought to objectify solely by means of painting. In the freedom of the teaching dispensed by Bakst, bit by bit Chagall elaborated his language, achieved the spatial mastery of colour, and gradually found his style. He was not influenced by Bakst’s Symbolist aesthetic, nor his decorative mannerism.

On the other hand, he rapidly mastered one of the painter’s demands, which was “the art of juxtaposing contrasting colours whilst balancing their reciprocal influence…[13]” This can be seen in The Small Parlour, dated 1908, executed at the beginning of his period of study with Bakst.

On a freely painted, delicate rose-coloured background, the arabesques of objects – chairs, table, and flower vase – are drawn in brown. The light forms seem to dance within an airy space which is devoid of any illusion of perspective.

Depth, without being described, is suggested by the use of a light green which hollows out the ground. In the foreground, the double curvature of the back of a chair and the broken angle of a table seem to set the whole space in motion in the manner of certain pastels by Degas.

In this work, Chagall has also revealed his colouristic skill. The virtuoso audacity of the composition manifests an ease which holds undivided sway in this picture executed at Liozno during a visit to the artist’s grandfather.

In fact, Chagall often visited his relatives; he painted his brother and sisters, his parents, and everyday scenes in the desire to sharpen his vision, to make it more refined. He painted Vitebsk, its streets and its wooden houses; Vitebsk, his childhood town and later an emblematic symbol of the land of his birth.

In the autumn of 1909 through Thea Brachman, a friend who had once posed for him, Chagall met his future wife, Bella Rosenfeld. An unforgettable meeting related by both in their memoirs: “Suddenly I realised that it was not with Thea that I should be but with her! Her silence is mine. Her eyes, mine; it was as if she had known me for a long time, as if she knew my whole childhood, my present, my future; as if she were watching over me, looking closer into me, although I saw her for the first time. I felt that this was my wife,[14]” relates Chagall in My Life. And in Lumières allumées Bella replies: “I dare not lift my eyes and meet the boy’s look. His eyes are now greyish green, sky and water. Is it in these eyes or in a river that I am swimming…?[15]” My Fiancée in Black Gloves (1909) is evidence of the confusion they felt.

The work was the first in a long series of portraits of Bella and belongs with his family portraits of David, Mania, and Aniuta, but yet it is distinguished from them by its air of grave solemnity. Bella, in a white dress decorated with a collar of pleated lace, stands in the centre of the picture.

Her head, slightly turned to one side, is topped with a beret from beneath which her brown hair shows. The spatial composition and the pose itself endow the figure with a certain monumentality, as seen in portraits painted in the classical tradition.

But the chromatic contrast between the dazzling white of the dress and the deep black of the gloves gives a strange charm to this female figure, as mysterious as an apparition. The simultaneous opposition of colours marks the appearance of a new conception which broke the laws of genre and would eventually be brought to fulfilment.

My Fiancée in Black Gloves, and later Bella with a White Collar (1917), are true portraits in their acute observation of the physical and psychological verity of the sitter. But the sitter is not the prisoner of her own individuality.

The image of the beloved woman, the image of the love which she arouses, Bella takes on the universal dimension of a type. The picture is in this sense an icon. Its function is not representative but demonstrative. It has a hidden meaning.

From 1909, Chagall was concerned with the major question of creativity – that of the very status of painting – which practice forced upon him. Was painting only the illusionistic replication of the material world? Should it not, on the contrary, be the privileged mode of exploring beyond the appearances which make up perceptible reality? Should it not be, like poetry, one of the means of revealing being? An ancient philosophical debate that goes back to Plato, this line of questioning runs through the whole history of painting.

In Russia, it took on a fundamental dimension which was to characterise all the experiments of the Russian avant-garde from Goncharova to Malevich. But Chagall consistently rebelled against all attempts to theorise art.

Did he meet, for example, at Bakst’s, Larionov and Goncharova, already embarked in 1909 and 1910 on the Futurist adventure? Not one precise document to this day confirms this. The young painter, despite his probable awareness of the breadth and effervescent vitality of the young Russian artistic movement, worked alone. The themes of his personal symbolism were born only of his internal experience, of the creative reverie of images which ally painting to poetry. Two pictures are the specific expression of this: The Dead Man (1908) and Birth (1910).

The Artist’s Sister (Mania), 1909. Oil on canvas, 93 x 48 cm. Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne.

Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Marjasinka, 1914. Oil on cardboard, 51 x 36 cm. Private collection, St. Petersburg.

The Newspaper Vendor, 1914. Oil on canvas, 98 x 78.5 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The Bread Merchant, 1910. Oil on canvas, 65.4 x 75 cm. Private collection.

To Russia, Asses and Others, 1911-1912. Oil on canvas, 157 x 122 cm. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

The Drunkard, 1911-1912. Oil on canvas, 85 x 115 cm. Private collection, H.Neumann, Caracas.

Russian Village, 1911. Oil on canvas, 126 x 104 cm. Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst, Munich.

The author’s analysis of the latter strongly underlines the sacramental character that transforms an ordinary scene into a liturgical celebration, a characteristic that was already visible in The Dead Man. A specific memory related by Chagall in My Life was the basis for this picture: “One morning, well before dawn, cries suddenly rose up in the street beneath the window. By the feeble glimmer of the night-light I was able to distinguish a woman running alone through the deserted streets. She was afraid to stay alone with her [dead] husband. Disturbed people ran up from all sides.

“The whole world was wailing, crying. But those who were steadier, used to everything, drew the woman aside, quietly lit the candles and surrounded by silence began to pray out loud over the head of the dead man. The light of the yellow candles, the colour of the face – only just dead, the assurance of the movements of the old ones, their impassive eyes persuaded me and those around that everything was over… The dead man, solemnly sad, was already lying on the ground, the face lit by six candles.[16]”

Other images mix with this memory: that of the eccentric grandfather whom he often found perched on the roof of the house; that of his violinist uncle. But if memory furnished the elements of the picture, the picture is not reduced to its simple and naturalistic transcription.

Each element is revealed as a constituent part of the whole. In the centre is the village street with here and there little houses of wood crowned with thatched roofs. On the left side of the street, the dead man lies on the ground surrounded by the six candles. To the right a woman, arms lifted to the sky, is running, while disappearing between the houses is a man of whom we can see only his legs. In the middle of the street, a sweeper, indifferent to the scene, carries on with his work.

Chagall indisputably took the main part of the scene from his own recollections, but the comparison of the narrative with the picture already indicates some differences. Whilst the figure of the woman conforms to the tale, there is no trace there of the sweeper and of the other person whose legs we see, impossible to identify, a person without a face like death itself. The realistic details – the lighted candles, the corpse lying on the ground – do indeed correspond to the Jewish funeral ritual.

But the exhibition of the body in the middle of the village is invented. The violinist, in turn, seems to be a sort of collage in a single figure of memories of his grandfather on the roof and his musician uncle. The composition is based on a cross formation and relies upon the positioning of the figures. The violinist in the upper part forms a vertical which is opposed with the dead body lying horizontally in the lower part.

The woman in distress turns her back on the sweeper. Through the window of the house to the left a light is shining. That of the house to the right is in darkness. The street itself, a dark triangle, is the antithesis of the sky, a light triangle. The choice of colours also corresponds to the formal composition.