The paintings of Marc Chagall (1887-1985), the best-known Russian artist of
the 20th century, are haunted by figures in flight or suspense and by worlds
turned upside down. His life itself, as revealed in this vivid, densely
detailed biography, was also a series of flights and strange meetings
propelled by the events of European history. The Chagall who died in the
south of France a world-famous artist and a friend of the Rolling Stones'
bass guitarist Bill Wyman, was born Moyshe Shagal, the son of a herring
seller, in Vitebsk on the fringes of the Russian empire. Thirty at the time
of the October revolution, he was a commissar of arts in the revolution's
palmy early days, but fled the Soviet system in 1922. In 1941, perilously
late, he escaped from Vichy France to New York. Even without the art, it
would be a remarkable life.
As a Jew born in the Pale, Chagall was always, in one sense, in exile: shut
out from the mainstream of Russian life, forbidden by law to live in St
Petersburg. At the age of 20, he went there anyway. Arriving in a city where
the young Prokofiev and Stravinsky were studying under Rimsky-Korsakov, and
where seven-year-old Vladimir Nabokov was driven to school in his father's
limousine, Chagall got a job as a footman and lived in a cupboard under the
stairs. In 1910, he fled home and began to paint.
In Vitebsk, he felt suffocated; away from it, he was homesick and alienated.
For the rest of his life, long after he left Russia permanently in 1922 for
Paris, his art existed between these two extremes in a place of its own,
celebrating the world of his childhood, but from a distance. With time, the
life of the shtetls, small Jewish towns such as Vitebsk, was eradicated,
just as it had passed from his own experience. This coincidence of his art
with what Jackie Wullschlager calls a “brief window of history” gave Chagall
his opportunity and his main theme: images of little houses, goats, cows and
Jewish violinists, even the longcase clock from his family home, recurred
obsessively.
Interwar Europe was a looking-glass world in which Chagall, with his young
wife, Bella, and their daughter, Ida, joined tens of thousands of the
displaced and dispossessed. Like an image from one of his paintings, the
little family - carrying the baby's cot, the samovar and the canvases - wove
their way towards Paris through improvised communities where Tolstoyan
countesses rubbed shoulders with constructivists and, in Berlin, the Russian
émigrés' football team played Nabokov in goal.
Chagall's art was born out of such synthesis. His Russian- Jewish heritage met
the high tide of western modernism, but was not subsumed. He took something
from cubism, without becoming a cubist, and gave something to surrealism,
without considering himself a surrealist (though André Breton hailed him as
the movement's founding father). The result was unmistakable, original but
also self-contained; and therein, Wullschlager suggests, lay Chagall's
artistic downfall. His highly personal mythology, taken from its roots, had
no scope for growth and, feeding on itself, dwindled into sentiment and
cliché. He repeated his leitmotifs until they lapsed into self-parody. As
Wullschlager admits, by the time his fame reached its height, after the
second world war, his best work was behind him.
Wullschlager paints a brilliant panorama of Chagall's life and times. On the
art, she is scholarly and shrewd, emphasising the importance of his early,
less-known theatre designs, and making a valiant case for the late stained
glass. Chagall himself, however, remains elusive - a self-created thing of
smoke and mirrors. Written when he was 35 and on the brink of leaving
Russia, his memoirs, like his paintings, were colourful, artistic
compositions that took little account of reality. Despite unprecedented
access to the archives, Wullschlager seems unable or unwilling to pin him
down. She leaves it open to the reader to dislike him, which, by and large,
we do, concluding that in life as well as on canvas he lived cocooned in his
own world, engaging with what lay beyond only as and when he chose. Having
decided to miss his mother's funeral in 1915, he explained that he “couldn't
have endured it. As it is, I feel life too keenly”. This tenderness towards
himself cost others dear. In 1937, the year he became a French citizen, he
wrote on a sentimental whim to his former teacher, Yuri Moyseevich Pen,
still in Vitebsk. Pen's murder, just a month later, was almost certainly a
consequence of this letter from the dissident Chagall.
Framing his shifting shape are Bella and Ida. Beautiful and powerful, they
emerge as far more vital characters. Like Chagall, Bella was from Vitebsk,
and in their shared memories of the shtetl, the artist had perhaps the
closest thing he knew, as an adult, to a home. Idolised by Chagall in
painting after painting, Bella was his best critic and greatest promoter.
After her death in 1944 in New York, he was unable, for the first time in
his life, to work. Yet still he was not honest. Bella's health had been worn
down by years of wandering and worry and she succumbed to a sudden
infection. Guilty at the thought that he had neglected her, Chagall
convinced himself that her death was due to anti-semitic doctors.
What he told himself about his daughter Ida, Wullschlager does not explain;
but she, too, was destined to become a victim of her father's
self-protectiveness and her own desire to protect him. After their return to
France in 1948, Chagall embarked on an unhappy affair with an Englishwoman,
Virginia McNeil. When that unravelled, Ida decided to take matters into her
own hands by arranging a suitable marriage. In Valentina Brodsky (“Vava”),
another Jewish refugee who had seen the worst of the pogroms and was, at 47,
withdrawn, virginal and highly determined, Ida created a monster. They were
married in 1952 and from then on Vava ran Chagall's life. She fixed his
prices so that he could seem innocent about money while making it. She cut
him off from his grandchildren and his daughter, and for ease of mind he
acquiesced. Thrown out of the world of her childhood, Ida lapsed into
illness and alcoholism while Chagall and Vava lived on in the south of
France with the other great survivors, Picasso and Matisse. Not that this
was the heroic idyll it might seem. Never easy with other people's fame,
Chagall was discomforted when the road he lived on was renamed Avenue Henri
Matisse, and relations were much worse with Picasso, or “l'Espagnol” as
Chagall dismissively called him.
The ruthlessness of artists is a commonplace, but to his obsessive need to be
at peace Chagall surely sacrificed something of his art. The world of
Vitebsk, the trauma of war and revolution, were turned to favour and to
prettiness. In post-war Europe, where a fragile neo-romanticism helped
assuage the horrors of the recent past, Chagall was more popular than ever,
the first artist in France for whose work a museum, the Musée National
Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice, was created in his lifetime. But it
was a Faustian pact. The fame, the money, the long afterlife with Vava until
he died, painlessly and in possession of all his faculties at the age of 97,
were bought perhaps with something of his soul.
Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager
Allen Lane £30 pp608
