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 The Alchemy of Marc Chagall "Chagall: Known and Unknown" Opens at the Grand Palaisby Ellen McBreenEllen McBreen, Director of Paris Muse and an art historian specializing in 20th-century French art, is offering excellent private guided tours of the Chagall retrospective at the Grand Palais.
"Dedicated to my Fiancée" (1911), for example, one of the 200-plus paintings in the show, depicts a man-bull hybrid beast seated at a table with a woman wrapped around his shoulders. She is spitting into his mouth. It was the first work to get an unknown Chagall any notice. Considered pornographic in 1912, it was taken off the walls of the Salon des Indépendants just hours after opening.
This startling image of almost hallucinatory passion (the writer Apollinaire called it a "golden ass smoking opium"), forces us to reconsider Chagall as the experimental innovator he really was. "Dedicated to My Fiancée" is an admittedly extreme example of the "unknown" side of Chagall to which the exhibition title refers. Most of his paintings are not this dark in mood. In fact, it is the stunning luminosity of his eye-popping colors that makes the first three galleries of the show an absolute marvel. The strongest are those from his first stay in Paris (1910-1914), when you can see Chagall responding to the latest artistic innovations-namely Cubism-in a highly original way. He managed to find his own voice by remaining true to his Russian Jewish roots, drawing creative nourishment from them for the rest of his life.  His "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers" (1912-13) in the very first gallery is emblematic of this expatriate condition. (According to a Yiddish expression, to do something with seven fingers is to do it very well, and very fast). Two landscapes hover above the painter: the modernity of Paris meets the timelessness of Vitebsk, the Bellorussian village where the artist grew up, the eldest son of a Hassidic laborer. While Chagall spent most of his life in France, he never stopped returning to Vitebsk in his mind. His countless images of it were all the more vivid for his not being there.
Chagall painted this self-portrait in his first Paris studio at La Ruche, a rambling commune in Montparnasse where he and 200 fellow artists (Soutine, Léger, Archipenko among them) lived in total squalor. If you peer closely at his magnificent "Violinist" (1912-13) in the next gallery, you can see the texture of an old tablecloth showing through the matte white of the musician's coat. Chagall couldn't even afford canvases. He had better luck in post-Revolutionary Russia, where he garnered a prestigious commission to decorate the new Jewish Theatre in Moscow. These large-scale paintings from 1920 (gallery 5) are another highlight of the exhibition. Hidden away during the subsequent Stalinist repression of all things Jewish, they have only recently seen the light of day. With their subtle references to the spare Supremativist geometry of his fellow Russian Malevich, they are fascinating examples of Chagall's (once again) very idiosyncratic response to the avant-garde ideas swirling around him. Malevich and Chagall were ideological adversaries. Chagall could not abide "soulless" abstraction; it is one of the reasons why he stands apart from all major currents of 20th-century art. While other artists were forming philosophies of "pure" painting and issuing manifestos, Chagall held fast to the notion that art should provide the accessible pleasure of a well-told story. There are literally hundreds of them to be enjoyed at the Grand Palais. Quick Access and Lively Tours of Classic Exhibits in Paris Ellen McBreen, Director of Paris Muse and an art historian specializing in 20th-century French art, is offering private guided tours of the Chagall retrospective. Her lively 90-minute tour is a unique opportunity to learn more about the artist's fascinating life story, and to understand the style and meanings of his work in greater depth. Learn more about the exhibit and the tour "Marc Chagall: Known and Unknown" until June 23. Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais: 3 Avenue du Général Eisenhower, 8th. Tel: (1) 44 13 17 17. Open daily 10am-8pm. Late night opening: Wednesday 10pm. Closed Tuesdays. Métro: Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau. |
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