Marc Chagall

Also from The New Criterion: when I went over for the Peter Thiel essay was a discussion of Marc Chagall, with Hilton Kramer trying to rehabilitate his legacy.

It is a mark of how little I know and understand these things that I didn't know his legacy needed rehabilitation. He was someone underclassmen were bubbling about when I was at school, suggesting that he had been featured in Janson's History of Art, one of the few textbooks we retained, sitting on a bottom shelf for decades. I thought he was interesting, but I didn't much like Modernist paintings then and rather shrugged him off.  As I became interested in Jewish history in the 1980's I saw a few things I liked. But not until 2001, when we had a layover of seven hours in Zurich while bringing the two Romanian sons home to America, was I quite such a fan.  We saw the stained glass windows, and I was mesmerised.  I bought a large postcard, which was on my bulletin board at work until I went part-time and became entirely deskless in 2017.  It would catch my eye and distract me.  I would stare at it a few minutes at a time over nearly two decades.

So it was a surprise to learn that had spent his later career (1887-1985), and certainly the time after, regarded as rather schlocky. Who knew? Not I, obviously. 

Thus, the crucial turn in Chagall’s life and work occurs not—as we have tended in the past to believe—in 1910, when he goes to Paris for the first time, but in 1922 when he uproots himself from his native Russia for the last time. From 1923 onward Chagall is a different kind of artist—an artist adrift in a dream of the past. There is even something apt in the choice of Gogol as the author he illustrated at this important juncture in his life, for not only does Chagall at that moment take leave of the present in order to find refuge in the past but there is a sense in which it can be said that he, too, now turns to trafficking in dead souls. The present is never again quite as real for Chagall as it was before 1922. Perhaps another way of saying this is that from this time onward he severs his connection with history. Thereafter, like those floating figures who now become so ubiquitous in his paintings—is this, perhaps, their real meaning?—he quits the realm of earthly events to enter a world of timeless and homeless archetypes, which, the further removed from real experience they become, the more they succumb to an unalloyed sentimentality. After his exit from Russia—which was also, it is worth recalling, his exit from the Revolution he served as an artist and a commissar—Chagall made some periodic attempts to re-attach his art to the realm of historical experience, most notably in the paintings he produced in 1944 as a response to the Holocaust. But by then it was too late. He no longer possessed the means of bringing that effort to an effective realization. In a sense he never touched earth again.

Well! This is rather breathtaking stuff for a man who never took an art class and only came upon such writing late in my own career as a dilettante. I look at such things and wonder how I can work it into conversations for the next year.