MARC
CHAGALL
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REVIEWS & PUBLICATIONS
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Marc
Chagall (1887-1985) : A Carnivalized Trauma
"And
were not the forewarnings in our plastic art right--
since we are truly up in the air and suffer from one
malady only -- the hankering for stability." -Marc
Chagall, My Life
Marc
Chagall continues to be, nearly twenty years after his
death, a wildly popular painter, but his work is still
not widely understood. His greatest paintings (not to
mention murals, textiles, stained-glass windows) are
colorist masterpieces whose compositional dream logic
invokes at once private metaphors and Biblical, political
ones. Because Chagall did not adhere to any one school
or style of painting, and because he continued to use
a similar lexicon of images in his work throughout his
long career, he is sometimes belittled with an epithet
involving the word "whimsical", which is a
shame. The museum or gallery-goer who prefers to consider
a given painting as the sum of its styles and influences
is the most likely culprit here, and the least likely
to really get Chagall. (Chagall's paintings do "flirt"
with cubism, fauvism, Russian iconography, secular medieval
narrative painting, theatrical and vaudeville traditions,
Hasidic imagery, and a host of other recurring tropes
and styles. He also paints the sorrow and longing of
an exile in mourning with sanguine humor; the viewer
who mistakes humor for an inconsequential or un-tragic
style, or for something interesting only to Jews, just
misses it.) To such a viewer, a Chagall painting is
a charming phantasm, a rummage sale of detritus from
the violence and romance of the twentieth century.
Of his paintings, Chagall said in an interview, "For
me a picture is a plane surface covered with representations
of objects-beasts, birds, or humans- in a certain order
in which anecdotal illustrational logic has no importance.
The visual effectiveness of the painted composition
comes first. Every extra-structural consideration is
secondary. I am against the terms 'fantasy' and 'symbolism'
in themselves. All our interior world is reality-and
that perhaps more so than our apparent world. To call
everything that appears illogical, 'fantasy,' fairy
tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding
nature."
One of the wonderful things about Chagall is that "nature"
for him is as much the body as it is the city, as much
wildlife as city life. Take La Nuit de Vence.
The blood and bird around the moon, which might as well
be a swollen egg-- a searing, portentous menstruation--
is a theme, along with childbirth and homeland, in many
of his paintings. This collusion of imagery is a violent
one, linking what is natural in the female body with
a more generalized, elemental pain, and calls to mind
all of the blood sacrifices in the Old Testament, not
to mention a host of pagan magics surrounding the anguished
sanctity of the menstrual cycle. It signifies both Biblical
shame and mystical power, a violence in the natural
order of things. Chagall famously said that Picasso
painted with his belly whereas he, Chagall, painted
with his heart. I think it not unfair to propose that
Picasso was about semen where Chagall was about menses.
Indeed, a number of my friends talk about Chagall as
a "feminine" painter: not because there are
flowers and romance in his canvasses, but because he
manages to make everything in his paintings-- even the
figures of joy and wholeness-- express a riotous longing,
a complex mixture of memory, fantasy, and mimesis that
must be felt to be understood. I am not a fan
of dividing ways of thinking and feeling along as rickety
a binary as the masculine and the feminine, especially
not when it comes to painting, (and indeed, the same
argument for Chagall as a feminine painter could be--and
is--made for him as a quintessentially Jewish, quintessentially
exilic, painter) but nevertheless, I think there is
something to this. Something about the way everything
longed-for is present, looms, in the midst of all that
it is not (shtetl landscapes superimposed on Parisian
ones, cattle and birds and bridal moons, pregnancies
and fishes...) seems made of a different--perhaps more
complex-- kind of desire than that singularly manly
Eros for possession that animates Picasso's treatment
of, say, the minotaur figure, or of the female form.
To look at a Chagall is to feel the rush of carnivalized
trauma, a voluptuous welter of memory teeming inside
the present. What has been called whimsical is not flighty
at all—rather, important tropes and figures recur
in Chagall’s paintings, functioning not so much
as symbols, but as Proustian palimpsests—objects
made sacred by the painter’s past and enriched
by the flux and metamorphoses of his geographical and
cultural displacement. As joyous as the paintings are—surging
with color, dauntlessly mixing elements of folklore,
cubism, religious painting, caricature, and even the
sacred mimetism of Paleolithic cave-dwellers—they
possess a ferocity that cannot be emphasized enough.
When Chagall, at age 35, wrote his autobiography, (a
goodly portion of which is devoted to a defense of his
“whimsical style”, in particular, painting
cattle and couples in the air) he articulated, in a
prose whose style reflects-- to remarkable effect--
that of his paintings, the major anguish of Modernism:
that it had to express the malady of that “hankering
for stability” experienced by so many exiles--Picasso,
Soutine, Miro, not to mention Samuel Beckett, Djuna
Barnes, Paul Celan, and a host of other displaced Modernist
geniuses.
Take the impetuosity and raucousness in a Marc Chagall
painting as an antidote to some of contemporary art's
obsessive miming of critical theory, but make no mistake:
it’s not pretty mush. No flaky dauber could do
with color or formal composition what Chagall has done--
his paintings have a freshness and immediacy that still
takes the breath away; their technical virtuosity belies
any dimestore magical realism they have been accused
of. Ezra Pound's anthemic injunction that the task of
Modernism was to "make it new" is very much
felt in Chagall's paintings: each one elicits as much
visceral pleasure as it does that metaphysical longing
"for stability", that infuses with delicious
newness what has become faded and monotonous our own,
less marvelously-hued memories.
-Ariana Reines
Columbia University
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