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Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s,
and is best known for its visual artworks and writings. The aim was to
"resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and
reality." Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes with photographic
precision, created strange creatures from everyday objects and developed
painting techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself.[1]
Surrealist
works feature the element of surprise, unexpected juxtapositions and non
sequitur; however, many Surrealist artists and writers regard their work as an
expression of the philosophical movement first and foremost, with the works
being an artifact. Leader André Bretonwas explicit in his assertion that
Surrealism was above all a revolutionary movement.
Surrealism
developed out of the Dada activities during World War I and the
most important center of the movement was Paris. From the 1920s onward, the
movement spread around the globe, eventually affecting the visual arts,
literature, film, and music of many countries and languages, as well
as political thought and practice, philosophy, and social theory.
Founding of the movement
The
word 'surrealist' was coined by Guillaume
Apollinaire and first appeared in the preface to his
play Les Mamelles de
Tirésias, which was written in 1903 and first
performed in 1917.
World War I scattered the writers and
artists who had been based in Paris, and in the interim many became involved
with Dada, believing that excessive rational thought and bourgeois values had brought the conflict
of the war upon the world. The Dadaists protested with anti-art gatherings, performances,
writings and art works. After the war, when they returned to Paris, the Dada
activities continued.
During
the war, André Breton, who had trained in medicine and
psychiatry, served in a neurological hospital where he used Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic
methods with soldiers suffering fromshell-shock. Meeting the young writer Jacques Vaché, Breton felt
that Vaché was the spiritual son of writer and pataphysics founder Alfred Jarry. He admired the
young writer's anti-social attitude and disdain for established artistic
tradition. Later Breton wrote, "In literature, I was successively taken
with Rimbaud, with Jarry, with Apollinaire, with Nouveau, with Lautréamont, but it is Jacques
Vaché to whom I owe the most."[2]
Back
in Paris, Breton joined in Dada activities and started the literary
journal Littérature along
with Louis Aragon and Philippe Soupault. They began
experimenting with automatic writing—spontaneously
writing without censoring their thoughts—and published the writings, as well as
accounts of dreams, in the magazine. Breton and Soupault delved deeper into
automatism and wroteThe Magnetic Fields (1920).
Continuing
to write, they attracted more artists and writers; they came to believe that
automatism was a better tactic for societal change than the Dada attack on
prevailing values. The group grew to include Paul Éluard, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Max Morise,[3] Pierre Naville, Roger Vitrac, Gala Éluard, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Hans Arp,Georges Malkine, Michel Leiris, Georges Limbour, Antonin Artaud, Raymond Queneau, André Masson, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy.[4]
Surrealist
Manifesto
Breton
wrote the manifesto of 1924 that defines the purposes of the group. He included
citations of the influences on Surrealism, examples of Surrealist works and
discussion of Surrealist automatism. He defined Surrealism as:
Dictionary: Surrealism,
n. Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally,
in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation
of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all
aesthetic and moral preoccupation.
Encyclopedia: Surrealism. Philosophy.
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of
previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the
disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all other psychic
mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal
problems of life.[7]
Expansion
The
movement in the mid-1920s was characterized by meetings in cafes where the
Surrealists played collaborative drawing games, discussed the theories of
Surrealism, and developed a variety of techniques such
as automatic drawing. Breton initially doubted that visual
arts could even be useful in the Surrealist movement since they appeared to be
less malleable and open to chance and automatism. This caution
was overcome by the discovery of such techniques as frottage and decalcomania.
Soon
more visual artists became involved, including Giorgio de Chirico, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Francis Picabia, Yves Tanguy, Salvador Dalí, Luis Buñuel, Alberto Giacometti, Valentine Hugo, Méret Oppenheim, Toyen, Kansuke Yamamoto and later
after the second war: Enrico Donati. Though Breton admired Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp and courted
them to join the movement, they remained peripheral.[8] More writers also joined,
including former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, René Char, and Georges Sadoul.
In
1925 an autonomous Surrealist group formed in Brussels. The group included the
musician, poet, and artist E. L. T. Mesens, painter and writer René Magritte, Paul Nougé, Marcel Lecomte, and André Souris. In 1927 they
were joined by the writer Louis Scutenaire. They corresponded regularly with the
Paris group, and in 1927 both Goemans and Magritte moved to Paris and
frequented Breton's circle.[4] The artists, with their roots
in Dada and Cubism, the abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky, Expressionism, and Post-Impressionism, also reached to
older "bloodlines" such as Hieronymus Bosch, and the so-called primitive and
naive arts.
André Masson's automatic drawings of 1923 are often used as the
point of the acceptance of visual arts and the break from Dada, since they
reflect the influence of the idea of the unconscious mind. Another example is Giacometti's
1925 Torso, which marked his movement to simplified forms and
inspiration from preclassical sculpture.
Impact of Surrealism
While
Surrealism is typically associated with the arts, it has been said[by whom?] to
transcend them; Surrealism has had an impact in many other fields. In this sense,
Surrealism does not specifically refer only to self-identified
"Surrealists", or those sanctioned by Breton, rather, it refers to a
range of creative acts of revolt and efforts to liberate imagination.[citation needed] In addition
to Surrealist ideas that are grounded in the ideas of Hegel, Marx and Freud, Surrealism is seen by its advocates as being
inherently dynamic and as dialectical in its thought.[clarification needed]
Other sources used by Surrealism epigons[edit]
Surrealists
have also drawn on sources as seemingly diverse as Clark Ashton Smith, Montague Summers, Horace Walpole, Fantomas, The Residents, Bugs Bunny, comic strips, the obscure poet Samuel Greenberg and
the hobo writer and
humourist T-Bone Slim. One might say that Surrealist
strands may be found in movements such as Free Jazz (Don Cherry, Sun Ra, Cecil Tayloretc.) and even in the daily lives of
people in confrontation with limiting social conditions. Thought of as the
effort of humanity to liberate imagination as an act of insurrection against
society, Surrealism finds precedents in the alchemists, possibly Dante, Hieronymus Bosch,[32][33] Marquis de Sade,[32] Charles Fourier, Comte de Lautreamont and Arthur Rimbaud.[34][35]
1960s riots
Surrealists
believe that non-Western cultures also provide a continued source of
inspiration for Surrealist activity because some may strike up a better balance
between instrumental reason and imagination in flight than Western culture.
Surrealism has had an identifiable impact on radical and revolutionary
politics, both directly — as in some Surrealists joining or allying themselves
with radical political groups, movements and parties — and indirectly — through
the way in which Surrealists emphasize the intimate link between freeing
imagination and the mind, and liberation from repressive and archaic social
structures. This was especially visible in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s and
the French revolt of May
1968,
whose slogan "All power to the imagination" rose directly from French
Surrealist thought and practice.
Postmodernism and popular culture
Many
significant literary movements in the later half of the 20th century were
directly or indirectly influenced by Surrealism. This period is known as
the Postmodern era; though there's no widely
agreed upon central definition of Postmodernism, many themes and techniques commonly
identified as Postmodern are nearly identical to Surrealism.
Many
writers from and associated with the Beat Generation were influenced greatly by
Surrealists. Philip Lamantia[36] and Ted Joans[37] are often categorized as both
Beat and Surrealist writers. Many other Beat writers show significant evidence
of Surrealist influence. A few examples include Bob Kaufman,[38][39] Gregory Corso,[40] Allen Ginsberg,[41] and Lawrence
Ferlinghetti.[42] Artaud in particular was very
influential to many of the Beats, but especially Ginsberg and Carl Solomon.[43] Ginsberg cites Artaud's
"Van Gogh -- The Man Suicided by Society" as a direct influence on
"Howl",[44] along with Apollinaire's
"Zone",[45] García Lorca's "Ode to Walt
Whitman",[46] and Schwitters'
"Priimiititiii".[47] The structure of Breton's
"Free Union" had a significant influence on Ginsberg's
"Kaddish".[48] In Paris, Ginsberg and Corso met
their heroes Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Benjamin Péret, and to
show their admiration Ginsberg kissed Duchamp's feet and Corso cut off
Duchamp's tie.[49]
William
S. Burroughs, a core member of the Beat Generation and a very influential
postmodern novelist, developed what he called the "cut-up technique"
with former surrealist Brion Gysin—in which chance is used to dictate
the composition of a text from words cut out of other sources—referring to it
as the "Surrealist Lark" and recognizing its debt to the techniques
of Tristan Tzara.[50]
Postmodern
novelist Thomas Pynchon, who was also influenced by Beat
fiction, experimented since the 1960s with the surrealist idea of startling
juxtapositions; commenting on the "necessity of managing this procedure
with some degree of care and skill", he added that "any old
combination of details will not do. Spike Jones, Jr., whose father's orchestral
recordings had a deep and indelible effect on me as a child, said once in an
interview, 'One of the things that people don't realize about Dad's kind of
music is, when you replace a C-sharp with a gunshot, it has to be a C-sharp gunshot
or it sounds awful.'"[5]
Many
other postmodern fiction writers have been directly influenced by
Surrealism. Paul Auster, for example, has translated
Surrealist poetry and said the Surrealists were "a real discovery"
for him.[51] Salman Rushdie, when called a Magical Realist, said
he saw his work instead "allied to surrealism".[52][53] For the work of other
postmodernists, such as Donald Barthelme[54] and Robert Coover,[55] a broad comparison to Surrealism
is common.
Magic realism, a popular technique among novelists
of the latter half of the 20th century especially among Latin American writers,
has some obvious similarities to Surrealism with its juxtaposition of the
normal and the dream-like, as in the work of Gabriel García
Márquez.[56] Carlos Fuentes was inspired by the
revolutionary voice in Surrealist poetry and points to inspiration Breton and
Artaud found in Fuentes' homeland, Mexico.[57] Though Surrealism was a direct
influence on Magic Realism in its early stages, many Magic Realist writers and
critics, such as Amaryll Chanady[58] and S. P. Ganguly,[59] while acknowledging the
similarities, cite the many differences obscured by the direct comparison of
Magic Realism and Surrealism such as an interest in psychology and the artefacts
of European culture they claim is not present in Magic Realism. A prominent
example of a Magic Realist writer who points to Surrealism as an early
influence is Alejo Carpentier who also later criticized
Surrealism's dilineation between real and unreal as not representing the true
South American experience.[60][61]
Marc Chagall
By- Thakur Dhirendranath
Marc
Zakharovich Chagall 6
July 1887 – 28 March 1985 was
a Russian-French artist.[1]:21 Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish
artist of the twentieth
century" (though Chagall saw his work as 'not the dream of one people but
of all humanity'). An early modernist, he was
associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic
medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets,
ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.
According to art historian Michael J. Lewis,
Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of
European modernists". For decades, he "had also been respected as the
world's preeminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the
cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows
for the UN, and
the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale
paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this
period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the
wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most
distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for
Paris in 1922.
He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as
a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's
"golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". Yet throughout these phases of his
style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one
long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk."[3] "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall
will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is".[4]
Marc Chagall was born Moishe Segal in a Jewish family in Liozna,[5] near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887.[note][6]At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population
was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish.[3] A picturesque city of churches and
synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after a cosmopolitan city of
the former Spanish Empire. As the city was built mostly of
wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World
War II.
Chagall was the eldest of nine children. The
family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually
borne by aLevitic family.[7] His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal,
was employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries
from their home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning
only 20 roubles each month. Chagall would later include fish motifs "out
of respect for his father", writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva.
Chagall wrote of these early years:
Day after day, winter and summer, at six
o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There
he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made
ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a
galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my
father's lot... There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table.
Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands.[8]
One of the main sources of income of the
Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was
sold throughout Russia. They also made furniture and various agricultural
tools.[9] From the late 18th century to the
First World War, the Russian government confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included modern Ukraine,
Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, almost exactly corresponding to the
territory of the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth recently taken over by Imperial Russia. This
caused the creation of Jewish market-villages (shtetls)
throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, schools, hospitals,
and other community institutions.[10]:14
Most of what is known about Chagall's early
life has come from his autobiography, My
Life. In it, he described the major influence that the culture of Hasidic
Judaism had on his life as an artist. Vitebsk itself had been a center of that
culture dating from the 1730s with its teachings derived from the Kabbalah. Chagall scholar Susan Goodman describes the
links and sources of his art to his early home:
Chagall's art can be understood as the response
to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they
were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader
society, Jews were considered outsiders in a frequently hostile society...
Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life; his parents
were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction
in a life defined by their faith and organized by prayer.[10]:14
Chagall formed a relationship with Sholom
Dovber Schneerson, and later with Menachem M. Schneerson.[11]
Art education
In Russia at that time, Jewish children were
not allowed to attend regular Russian schools or universities. Their movement
within the city was also restricted. Chagall therefore received his primary
education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible. At the age of 13, his mother
tried to enroll him in a Russian high school, and he recalled, "But in
that school, they don't take Jews. Without a moment's hesitation, my courageous
mother walks up to a professor." She offered the headmaster 50 roubles to
let him attend, which he accepted.[8]
A turning point of his artistic life came when
he first noticed a fellow student drawing. Baal-Teshuva writes that for the
young Chagall, watching someone draw "was like a vision, a revelation in
black and white". Chagall would later say that there was no art of any
kind in his family's home and the concept was totally alien to him. When
Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied,
"Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like,
and just copy it". He soon began copying images from books and found the
experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.[9]
He eventually confided to his mother, "I
want to be a painter", although she could not yet understand his sudden
interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that "seemed so
impractical", writes Goodman. The young Chagall explained, "There's a
place in town; if I'm admitted and if I complete the course, I'll come out a
regular artist. I'd be so happy!" It was 1906, and he had noticed the
studio of Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a realist artist who also operated a
small drawing school in Vitebsk, which included the future artists El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. Due to Chagall's youth and lack of
income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. However, after a few months at
the school, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his
desires.[9]
Artistic inspiration
Goodman notes that during this period in
Russia, Jews had two basic alternatives for joining the art world: One was to
"hide or deny one's Jewish roots". The other alternative—the one that
Chagall chose—was "to cherish and publicly express one's Jewish
roots" by integrating them into his art. For Chagall, this was also his
means of "self-assertion and an expression of principle."[10]:14
Art career
Russia (1906–1910
In 1906, he moved to St. Petersburg which was then the capital of Russia
and the center of the country's artistic life with its famous art schools.
Since Jews were not permitted into the city without an internal passport, he
managed to get a temporary passport from a friend. He enrolled in a prestigious
art school and studied there for two years.[9] By 1907, he had begun painting
naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes.
Between 1908 to 1910, Chagall was a student of Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and
Painting. While in St. Petersburg, he discovered experimental theater and the
work of such artists as Paul Gauguin.[13] Bakst, also Jewish, was a designer of
decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and
costumes for the 'Ballets Russes,' and helped Chagall by acting as a role model
for Jewish success. Bakst moved to Paris a year later. Art historian Raymond
Cogniat writes that after living and studying art on his own for four years,
"Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art. ...His
apprenticeship over, Russia had played a memorable initial role in his life.[14]:30
Chagall stayed in St. Petersburg until 1910,
often visiting Vitebsk where he met Bella Rosenfeld. In My
Life, Chagall described his first meeting her: "Her silence is mine,
her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present,
my future, as if she can see right through me."[9]:22
France (1910–1914
In 1910, Chagall relocated to Paris to
develop his artistic style. Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that
when Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form, and
French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th
century". But Chagall arrived from Russia with "a ripe color gift, a
fresh, unashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense
of humor", he adds. These notions were alien to Paris at that time, and as
a result, his first recognition came not from other painters but from poets
such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire.[15]:7 Art historian Jean
Leymarie observes that Chagall began thinking of art as
"emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the
psychic outpouring", which was the reverse of the Cubist way of creating.[16]
He therefore developed friendships
with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde luminaries such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. Baal-Teshuva writes that
"Chagall's dream of Paris, the city of light and above all, of freedom,
had come true."[9]:33 His first days were a hardship for the
23-year-old Chagall, who was lonely in the big city and unable to speak French.
Some days he "felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he
painted, about the riches of Russian folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and
especially Bella".
In Paris, he enrolled at Académie de La Palette, an avant-garde school of art where the painters Jean Metzinger, André
Dunoyer de Segonzac andHenri Le Fauconnier taught, and also found work at another
academy. He would spend his free hours visiting galleries and salons,
especially the Louvre; artists he came to admire included Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Millet,Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and others. It was in Paris that he
learned the technique of gouache, which he used to paint Belarusian scenes. He
also visited Montmartre and the Latin Quarter "and was happy just breathing
Parisian air."[9] Baal-Teshuva describes this new phase
in Chagall's artistic development:
Chagall was exhilarated, intoxicated, as he
strolled through the streets and along the banks of the Seine. Everything about
the French capital excited him: the shops, the smell of fresh bread in the
morning, the markets with their fresh fruit and vegetables, the wide boulevards,
the cafés and restaurants, and above all the Eiffel Tower.
Another completely new world that opened up
for him was the kaleidoscope of colours and forms in the works of French
artists. Chagall enthusiastically reviewed their many different tendencies,
having to rethink his position as an artist and decide what creative avenue he
wanted to pursue.[9]:33
During his time in Paris, Chagall was
constantly reminded of his home in Vitebsk, as Paris was also home to many
painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigrés from the
Russian Empire. However, "night after night he painted until dawn",
only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of
the big city at night.[9]:44 "My homeland exists only in my
soul", he once said.[16]:viii He continued painting Jewish motifs
and subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, although he included Parisian
scenes—- the Eiffel Tower in particular, along with portraits. Many of his
works were updated versions of paintings he had made in Russia, transposed into Fauvist or Cubist keys.[3]
Chagall developed a whole repertoire
of quirky motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky, ... the gigantic fiddler
dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and,
within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down.[3] The majority of his scenes of life in
Vitebsk were painted while living in Paris, and "in a sense they were
dreams", notes Lewis. Their "undertone of yearning and loss",
with a detached and abstract appearance, caused Apollinaire to be "struck
by this quality", calling them "surnaturel!" His
"animal/human hybrids and airborne phantoms" would later become a
formative influence on Surrealism.[3] Chagall, however, did not want his
work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own
personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself. But Sweeney notes
that others often still associate his work with "illogical and fantastic
painting", especially when he uses "curious representational
juxtapositions".[15]:10
Sweeney writes that "This is Chagall's
contribution to contemporary art: the reawakening of a poetry of
representation, avoiding factual illustration on the one hand, and
non-figurative abstractions on the other". André Breton said that "with him alone, the
metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting".[15]:7
Russia and Soviet Belarus (1914–1922
Because he missed his fiancée, Bella, who was
still in Vitebsk—"He thought about her day and night", writes
Baal-Teshuva—and was afraid of losing her, Chagall decided to accept an
invitation from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention
being to continue on to Belarus, marry Bella, and then return with her to
Paris. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to
be exhibited. The exhibit, held at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery was a huge success, "The German
critics positively sang his praises."[9]
After the exhibit, he continued on to Vitebsk,
where he planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella. However, after a few
weeks, the First World War began, closing the Russian border for an indefinite
period. A year later he married Bella Rosenfeld and they had their first child,
Ida. Before the marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents
that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about
her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support
her. Becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration. According
to Lewis, "[T]he euphoric paintings of this time, which show the young
couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk—its wooden buildings faceted in the
Delaunay manner—are the most lighthearted of his career".[3] His wedding pictures were also a
subject he would return to in later years as he thought about this period of
his life.[9]:75
The October
Revolution of 1917 was a dangerous time for Chagall although it
also offered opportunity. By then he was one of the Russia's most distinguished
artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special
privileges and prestige as the "aesthetic arm of the revolution".[3] He was offered a notable position as a
commissar of visual arts for the country[clarification needed], but
preferred something less political, and instead accepted a job as commissar of
arts for Vitebsk. This resulted in his founding the Vitebsk Arts College which,
adds Lewis, became the "most distinguished school of art in the Soviet
Union".
It obtained for its faculty some of the most
important artists in the country, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. He also added his first teacher,Yehuda Pen.
Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective of independently minded
artists, each with their own unique style. However, this would soon prove to be
difficult as a few of the key faculty members preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles, and
disapproved of Chagall's attempt at creating "bourgeois
individualism". Chagall then resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow.
In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in
Moscow, first exhibiting his works at a well-known salon and in 1916 exhibiting
pictures in St. Petersburg. He again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of
avant-garde artists. This exposure brought recognition, and a number of wealthy
collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish
books with ink drawings. He illustrated I. L. Peretz's The
Magician in 1917.[17] Chagall was 30 years old and had begun
to become well known.[9]:77
In Moscow he was offered a job as stage
designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to begin
operation in early 1921 with a number of plays by Sholem Aleichem. For its opening he created a number
of large background murals using techniques he learned from Bakst, his early
teacher. One of the main murals was 9 feet (2.7 m) tall by 24 feet
(7.3 m) long and included images of various lively subjects such as
dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. One critic at the time called it
"Hebrew jazz in paint". Chagall created it as a "storehouse of
symbols and devices", notes Lewis.[3] The murals "constituted a
landmark" in the history of the theatre, and were forerunners of his later
large-scale works, including murals for the New
York Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera.[9]:87
France (1923–1941)
In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to
France. On his way he stopped in Berlin to recover the many pictures he had
left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the war began, but was unable
to find or recover any of them. Nonetheless, after returning to Paris he again
"rediscovered the free expansion and fulfilment which were so essential to
him", writes Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to
paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil
paintings.[3]
He formed a business relationship with French
art dealer Ambroise Vollard. This inspired him to begin creating
etchings for a series of illustrated books, includingGogol's Dead
Souls, the Bible, and the La Fontaine's Fables. These illustrations would eventually
come to represent his finest printmaking efforts.[3] In 1924, he travelled to Brittany and painted La fenêtre sur l'Île-de-Bréhat.[18] By 1926 he had his first exhibition in
the United States at the Reinhardt gallery of New York which included about 100
works, although he did not travel to the opening. He instead stayed in France,
"painting ceaselessly", notes Baal-Teshuva.[9] It was not until 1927 that Chagall
made his name in the French art world, when art critic and historian Maurice
Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern
French Painters. However, Raynal was still at a loss to accurately describe
Chagall to his readers:
Chagall interrogates life in the light of a
refined, anxious, childlike sensibility, a slightly romantic temperament ... a
blend of sadness and gaiety characteristic of a grave view of life. His
imagination, his temperament, no doubt forbid a Latin severity of composition.[4]:314
During this period he traveled throughout
France and the Côte d'Azur, where he enjoyed the landscapes,
colorful vegetation, the blue Mediterranean Sea, and the mild weather. He made
repeated trips to the countryside, taking his sketchbook.[4]:9 He also visited nearby countries and
later wrote about the impressions some of those travels left on him:
I should like to recall how advantageous my
travels outside of France have been for me in an artistic sense—in Holland or
in Spain, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, or simply in the south of France. There, in
the south, for the first time in my life, I saw that rich greenness—the like of
which I had never seen in my own country. In Holland I thought I discovered
that familiar and throbbing light, like the light between the late afternoon
and dusk. In Italy I found that peace of the museums which the sunlight brought
to life. In Spain I was happy to find the inspiration of a mystical, if sometimes
cruel, past, to find the song of its sky and of its people. And in the East
[Palestine] I found unexpectedly the Bible and a part of my very being.[1]:77
The Bible illustrations
After returning to Paris from one of
his trips, Vollard commissioned him to illustrate the Old Testament. Although he could have completed the
project in France, he used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Palestine
to experience for himself the Holy Land. He arrived there in February 1931 and ended
up staying for two months. Chagall felt at home in Palestine where many people
spoke Yiddish and Russian. According to Jacob Baal-Teshuva, "he was
impressed by the pioneering spirit of the people in the kibbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and the other holy places".[9]:133
Chagall later told a friend that Palestine
gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received".
Wullschlager notes, however, that whereas Delacroix and Matisse had found
inspiration in the exoticism of North Africa, he as a Jew in Palestine had
different perspective. "What he was really searching for there was not
external stimulus but an inner authorization from the land of his ancestors, to
plunge into his work on the Bible illustrations".[4]:343 Chagall stated that "In the East
I found the Bible and part of my own being."
Post-war years[edit]
By 1946, his artwork was becoming more widely
recognized. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had a large exhibition
representing 40 years of his work which gave visitors one of the first complete
impressions of the changing nature of his art over the years. The war had ended
and he began making plans to return to Paris. According to Cogniat, "He
found he was even more deeply attached than before, not only to the atmosphere
of Paris, but to the city itself, to its houses and its views."[14] Chagall summed up his years living in
America:
I lived here in America during the inhuman war
in which humanity deserted itself... I have seen the rhythm of life. I have
seen America fighting with Allies... the wealth that she has distributed to
bring relief to the people who had to suffer the consequences of the war... I
like America and the Americans... people there are frank. It is a young country
with the qualities and faults of youth. It is a delight to love people like
that... Above all I am impressed by the greatness of this country and the
freedom that it gives.[9]:170
He went back for good during the autumn of
1947, where he attended the opening of the exhibition of his works at the Musée
National d'Art Moderne.[14]
France (1948–1985
After returning to France he traveled
throughout Europe and chose to live in the Côte d'Azur which by that time had become somewhat
of an "artistic centre". Matisse lived above Nice,
whilePicasso lived in Vallauris. Although they lived nearby and sometimes
worked together, there was artistic rivalry between them as their work was so
distinctly different, and they never became long-term friends. According to
Picasso's mistress, Françoise Gilot, Picasso still had a great deal of
respect for Chagall, and once told her,
Chagall's daughter Ida married art historian
Franz Meyer in January 1952, and feeling that her father missed the
companionship of a woman in his home, introduced him to Valentina (Vava)
Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background, who had run a
successful millinery business in London. She became his secretary, and after a
few months agreed to stay only if Chagall married her. The marriage took place
in July 1952[9]:183—though six years later, when there was
conflict between Ida and Vava, "Marc and Vava divorced and immediately
remarried under an agreement more favourable to Vava" (Jean-Paul
Crespelle: Chagall, l'Amour le Reve et la Vie, quoted in Haggard: My Life with
Chagall).
In 1954, he was engaged as set decorator for Robert Helpmann's production of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Le Coq d'Or at the Royal
Opera House, Covent Garden, but he withdrew. The Australian designer Loudon Sainthill was drafted at short notice in his
place.[26]
In the years ahead he was able to produce not
just paintings and graphic art, but also numerous sculptures and ceramics,
including wall tiles, painted vases, plates and jugs. He also began working in
larger-scale formats, producing large murals, stained glass windows, mosaics
and tapestries.[9]
In 1963, Chagall was commissioned to paint the
new ceiling for the Paris Opera (Palais Garnier), a majestic 19th-century building
and national monument. André Malraux, France's Minister of Culture wanted
something unique and decided Chagall would be the ideal artist. However, this
choice of artist caused controversy: some objected to having a Russian Jew
decorate a French national monument; others disliked the ceiling of the
historic building being painted by a modern artist. Some magazines wrote
condescending articles about Chagall and Malraux, about which Chagall commented
to one writer:
They really had it in for me... It is amazing
the way the French resent foreigners. You live here most of your life. You
become a naturalized French citizen... work for nothing decorating their
cathedrals, and still they despise you. You are not one of them.[9]:196
Nonetheless, Chagall continued the project
which took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete. The final canvas was
nearly 2,400 square feet (220 sq. meters) and required 440 pounds of paint. It
had five sections which were glued to polyester panels and hoisted up to the
70-foot (21 m) ceiling. The images Chagall painted on the canvas paid
tribute to the composers Mozart, Wagner,Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel, as well as to famous actors and dancers.[9]:199
It was presented to the public on 23 September
1964 in the presence of Malraux and 2,100 invited guests. The Paris
correspondent for the New York
Times wrote, "For once
the best seats were in the uppermost circle:[9]:199 Baal-Teshuva writes:
To begin with, the big crystal chandelier
hanging from the centre of the ceiling was unlit... the entire corps de ballet came onto the stage, after which, in
Chagall's honour, the opera's orchestra played the finale of the "Jupiter Symphony" by Mozart, Chagall's favorite
composer. During the last bars of the music, the chandelier lit up, bringing
the artist's ceiling painting to life in all its glory, drawing rapturous
applause from the audience.[9]:199
Art styles
and techniques
Color
According to Cogniat, in all Chagall's work
during all stages of his life, it was his colors which attracted and captured
the viewer's attention. During his earlier years his range was limited by his
emphasis on form and his pictures never gave the impression of painted
drawings. He adds, "The colors are a living, integral part of the picture
and are never passively flat, or banal like an afterthought. They sculpt and
animate the volume of the shapes... they indulge in flights of fancy and
invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones... His colors
do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes
and rhythms."[14]
He was able to convey striking images using
only two or three colors. Cogniat writes, "Chagall is unrivalled in this
ability to give a vivid impression of explosive movement with the simplest use
of colors..." Throughout his life his colors created a "vibrant
atmosphere" which was based on "his own personal vision."[14]:60
His paintings would later sell for very great
prices. In October 2010, for example, his painting "Bestiaire et Musique," depicting a bride
and a fiddler floating in a night sky amid circus performers and animals,
"was the star lot" at an auction in Hong Kong. When it sold for
$4.1 million, it became the most expensive contemporary Western painting
ever sold in Asia.[27]
Subject matter
From life memories to fantasy
Chagall's early life left him with a
"powerful visual memory and a pictorial intelligence", writes
Goodman. After living in France and experiencing the atmosphere of artistic
freedom, his "vision soared and he created a new reality, one that drew on
both his inner and outer worlds." But it was the images and memories of his
early years in Belarus that would sustain his art for more than 70 years.[10]:13
According to Cogniat, there are certain
elements in his art that have remained permanent and seen throughout his
career. One of those was his choice of subjects and the way they were
portrayed. "The most obviously constant element is his gift for happiness
and his instinctive compassion, which even in the most serious subjects
prevents him from dramatization..."[14]:89 Musicians have been a constant during
all stages of his work. After he first got married, "lovers have sought
each other, embraced, caressed, floated through the air, met in wreaths of
flowers, stretched, and swooped like the melodious passage of their vivid
day-dreams. Acrobats contort themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the
end of their stems; flowers and foliage abound everywhere."[14] Wullschlager explains the sources for
these images:
For him, clowns and acrobats always resembled
figures in religious paintings... The evolution of the circus works... reflects
a gradual clouding of his worldview, and the circus performers now gave way to
the prophet or sage in his work—a figure into whom Chagall poured his anxiety
as Europe darkened, and he could no longer rely on the lumiére-liberté of France for inspiration.[4]:337
Chagall described his love of circus people:
Why am I so touched by their makeup and
grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons... Chaplin seeks to do in
film what I am trying to do in my paintings. He is perhaps the only artist
today I could get along with without having to say a single word.[4]:337
His early pictures were often of the town
where he was born and raised, Vitebsk. Cogniat notes that they are realistic and
give the impression of firsthand experience by capturing a moment in time with
action, often with a dramatic image. During his later years, as for instance in
the "Bible series", subjects were more dramatic. He managed to blend
the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color the pictures
were always at least acceptable if not powerful. He never attempted to present
pure reality but always created his atmospheres through fantasy.[14]:91 In all cases Chagall's "most
persistent subject is life itself, in its simplicity or its hidden
complexity... He presents for our study places, people, and objects from his
own life".
Jewish themes
After absorbing the techniques of Fauvism and Cubism (under the influence of Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes)[28] Chagall was able to blend these
stylistic tendencies with his own folkish style. He gave the grim life of Hasidic Jews the "romantic overtones of a
charmed world", notes Goodman. It was by combining the aspects of Modernism with his "unique artistic
language", that he was able to catch the attention of critics and
collectors throughout Europe. Generally, it was his boyhood of living in a
Belarusian provincial town that gave him a continual source of imaginative
stimuli. Chagall would become one of many Jewish émigrés who later became noted
artists, all of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most
numerous and creative minorities", notes Goodman.[10]:13
World War I, which ended in 1918, had
displaced nearly a million Jews and destroyed what remained of the provincial shtetl culture that had defined life for most Eastern European Jews for centuries. Goodman notes,
"The fading of traditional Jewish society left artists like Chagall with
powerful memories that could no longer be fed by a tangible reality. Instead,
that culture became an emotional and intellectual source that existed solely in
memory and the imagination... So rich had the experience been, it sustained him
for the rest of his life."[10]:15 Sweeney adds that "if you ask
Chagall to explain his paintings, he would reply, 'I don't understand them at
all. They are not literature. They are only pictorial arrangements of images that
obsess me..."[15]:7
In 1948, after returning to France from the
U.S. after the war, he saw for himself the destruction that the war had brought
to Europe and the Jewish populations. In 1951, as part of a memorial book
dedicated to eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France,
he wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950", which
inspired paintings such as the "Song of David" (see photo):
Final
years and death
Author Serena Davies writes that "By the
time he died in France in 1985—the last surviving master of European modernism,
outliving Joan Miró by two years—he had experienced at
first hand the high hopes and crushing disappointments of the Russian
revolution, and had witnessed the end of the Pale, the near annihilation of European
Jewry, and the obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a
population of 240,000 survived the Second World War."[45]
Chagall's last work was a commissioned piece
of art for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (for all disabled people of
the world). The maquette painting titled “Job” was completed, but Chagall died
just before the completion of the tapestry.[46] Yavett Cauquil Pierce was weaving the
tapestry under Chagall's supervision and was the last person to work with
Chagall before his death. She left Vava and Marc Chagall's home at 4 pm on
March 28th after discussing and matching the final colors from the maquette
painting for the tapestry. He died that evening.[47]
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