BIOGRAPHY:Marc Chagall created the basis of his worldwide fame in Paris, and it remained the place he felt most at home throughout his Ulyssean career, writes BRIAN FALLON.
MARC CHAGALL (his actual name was Moyshe Shagal) outlived all his great contemporaries of the now-defunct School of Paris, dying in 1985, just a few years short of a hundred. By then he had become almost a nostalgic figure, though his works were hung in all the great galleries of the world and his most trivial drawing or lithograph was an item pounced on by collectors. Chagall was one of the last great painters (Dufy was another) whom the average man or woman found immediately accessible, and reproductions of his work were disseminated as freely as bottles of Coca-Cola in high summer.
With a high proportion of the critics and cognoscenti, however, the story was quite different. Chagall's very popularity told against him and many of his later works, in particular, were viewed as facile and repetitive, almost kitschy. And the kind of folksy, Yiddish element on which he had obviously capitalised did tend to get up the noses of people who were far from being anti-Semitic, but who found the stage-Jewishness of the musical The Fiddler on the Roofjust a bit much. (That title, incidentally, was borrowed from a Chagallian motif which was based, in turn, on a real-life character of his ghetto youth.)
It seems to me, however, that Chagall was both popular and disliked for essentially wrong reasons. The public found him charming, whimsical and "cute" in an almost Disneyland sense, while the critics mostly failed to realise that they were dealing with a visual poet, a unique visionary with deep roots in the East. The most intellectually respectable phase of his work was created in Paris just before the first World War, when he harnessed his ultra-Russian, ultra-Jewish subject matter to avant-garde forms and innovations. Cubism, Futurism and the freewheeling colour of his friend Delaunay gave him a formal scaffolding which enabled him to create such original masterpieces as I and the Village.
It has often been said that he drew his early material from Russian village life; but in fact Vitebsk, where he grew up, was a town larger than Cork. (It is also in Belarus.) Chagall was very much a child of the ghetto, one of a large family with poor, struggling parents of whom his mother was the dominant figure. She pestered a local painter named Pen into giving her son lessons, and later he studied in St Petersburg under Leon Bakst, a pampered and fashionable artist of Diaghilev's Ballet Russe circle.
Tsarist Russia was strongly anti-Semitic and young Chagall was often in trouble about residence permits. Eventually, with the help of a monied patron, he made his way to Paris and inside a few years was at the centre of a cultural vortex which included poets, publicists, painters and, of course, a certain percentage of intellectual pseuds. It was the great turning point of his career - Russians are generally at home with French culture, as witness the cases of Turgenev, Stravinsky and Kandinsky.
THE GREAT WAR BROUGHT HIM BACK to Russia and he married Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of wealthy Vitebsk jewellers who regarded their son-in-law as a plebeian upstart. She was beautiful, talented, sympathetic, and above all exceptional, with ambitions to become an actress which she largely buried on his behalf. When the Revolution came, her family was ruined and their shop and home were looted by Bolsheviks; Chagall, however, sided with the new regime and was involved in various Proletcult (proletarian culture) activities, including running the local art school and teaching in a school for war orphans. He also did some inspired designs and wall paintings for the Jewish Theatre in Moscow. But art politics were by now explosive matters in Russia, and the Messianic cult of Malevich and his abstractionist followers was one of the chief factors which forced Chagall into exile, a fate he shared with Kandinsky and Naum Gabo.
He moved to Berlin, where he, Bella and their small daughter Ida became central figures in a seething milieu of Russian émigrés, many of them dispossessed aristocrats. But soon they headed on to Paris, where Chagall was always most at home, and the basis of his worldwide fame was mainly laid there inside the next decade and a half. Then came another world war and he and his family fled south, and thence to America. He did not like it there, however, nor did Bella, and the great tragedy of his life occurred when she died in hospital of a throat infection, beautiful and supportive to the last. (Penicillin would have saved her, but wartime shortages restricted its use to the armed forces.) Meanwhile the Germans had invaded Russia, and the Vitebsk Jewish quarter in which both of them had grown up was virtually wiped from the face of the earth.
After the war Chagall returned to France and entered into an ill-judged liaison with an eccentric, upper-crust young Englishwoman by whom he had a son; later his daughter, a vital personality in her own right, engineered his marriage to an émigréRusssian businesswoman named Valentina (Vava ) Brodsky. Predictably, she ran his life for him since Chagall, though always hungry for money and fame and in ways quite calculating, was easily manipulated by strong-minded women. Even Ida, the architect of the marriage, was brusquely told by Vava that she was no longer her father's agent - a cruel blow financially, and an act of gross ingratitude. Yet however henpecked he may have been, Chagall was enormously productive in his later years, producing not only a large body of paintings and graphic work, but also ballet designs, superb stained-glass windows and, of course, the great ceiling of the Paris Opera.
JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER HAS TOLD HER story well, so much so that various elements fall into place which previously had seemed random and disconnected. The book has numerous colour reproductions as well as evocative black-and-white photographs, some of them going back a hundred years. Since Chagall has engendered a rather poor and inadequate literature, this well-researched, intelligent biography obviously will fill a major gap. With its overall artistic judgements I am less happy, since often it merely rehearses the cliched judgement that Chagall's early work is his best and most authentic, while many of the later paintings are relatively tired and slick. They are not; they are simply different, but equally original.
Various major artists have had their late work undervalued - Vuillard, Derain, Braque, de Chirico, Dufy are all obvious examples. Chagall's middle-period work, in fact, includes some of his greatest and most original pictures, many of which carry haunting images of war, emigration and persecution - particularly of his own race.
He seems, during this phase, to have looked hard at the Baroque masters and at the great Venetians, notably Tintoretto, but he also went right back to his Byzantine heritage. His "third period" is altogether more passive, contemplative and remote, though with a gently erotic flavour which harks back to the Song of Songs. Its soft, irradiated colour, daringly loose construction, and sometimes penumbral mood are elements with which contemporary criticism is only just beginning to catch up. This is not to devalue the early paintings, it is simply to point out that Chagall, though uneven and probably over-productive, was equally inspired throughout all the major phases of his long, Ulyssean career.
• Chagall: Love and Exile,by Jackie Wullschlager, Allen Lane, 582pp, £30
• Brian Fallon was art critic of The Irish Times for thirty-five years. He is the author of numerous books and essays on art, literature and culture