“Tell me, Chagall, why this music..."

Press, 19 November 1977, Page 14

“Tell me, Chagall, why this music..."

By

PAUL WEBSTER

in Paris

“When I came to Paris 60 years ago I vowed that Rembrandt would love me,” Marc Chagall said, as he supervised the exhibition of his paintings which President Valery Giscard d’Estaing opened — “today I wouldn’t dare to be so presumptuous.” Any attempt to seek an interpretation of the paintings is resented. As long ago as 1914 he is recorded as saying: “Don’t ask me why I paint in blue or green or why there’s a calf in the cow’s stomach.” A journalist’s article was once returned with the words: “No explanation, always vague, do you understand me, cloud!” The Louvre exhibition of 70 works is proof that he is in a continual state of change and doubt, even though he was 90 years old in July. The dominant shade after years of raw colour is grey — .the “dazzling” grey of Paris, he says. The paintings themselves cover only the last 10 years and most of them have never been seen before, because he did not want a “burial exhibition,” preferring to be seen as a “young painter.” New subjects like the “Fall of Icarus” and “Don Quixote” could be interpreted as curiously revealing

studies for a man who can check his value both in material terms and public adulation. Yet Chagall went into hiding when the selection panel came to his workshop in Saint Paul de Vence near Nice to choose the pictures. When his great retrospective was held at the Grand Palais seven years ago he said: “I’m afraid.” Of his new exhibition, he remarked: “Believe me, it’s not funny going into the Louvre.” These are odd statements to be made by a man who can consistently command as much as $200,000 for an artwork — only Francis Bacon can claim the same — and some commentators find the naivety irritating and artificial. Even his lithographs, the best sellers of any contemporary artist since the death of Picasso, fetch record figures. Some double or treble their value as soon as they are bought, the highest recorded resale price being $2740. A colour crayon drawing fetched more than $lBOO and his illustrated bibles nearly $lO,OOO. His ninetieth birthday should have convinced him of his international popularity. The Pope praised him, he received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, Rostropovitch gave him a

personal recital and he has been honoured in New York, Chicago, and soon in Israel. For those who believe his reactions are genuine, the naive anxiety might really be bewilderment both on a personal and artistic level. Chagall has never really come to terms with his modest beginnings or his exile. He paints in France, but even now talks of his Russian birthplace, Vitebsk as if he had just left the photographer’s shop where he once used to paint out the wrinkles on portraits. There is no logical ex planation why one of the If children of a Jewist fishmonger’s assistant should not only command the world’s highest art prices but have been the painter who fascinated poets and writers like Blaise Cendrars, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Andre Gide and Andre Malraux. At the same time he is virtually ignored in the country that figures most prominently in his primary inspiration. Andre Gide called his work “the ingenuous miracle.” It has fascinated the French through all stages from its early naive surrealism, through the Biblical message series, through the giant paintings for the Paris and Metropolitan Operas and the stained glass windows, he says, “saved me from the museum tomb.’’

At the same time the Russians never liked him. After four years in Paris, he went back in 1914 to run the Vitebsk art school. He lost his job, consoling himself with painting the Jewish theatre in Moscow, and was not asked back until 1973 after 50 years’ absence. He spent only nine day.* there, part of the time picking his way through his pictures that are held in art gallery stores. He brought back the vague promise that the paintings which he left in Russia might one day be shown in Paris, perhaps in next year’s Moscow-Paris exhibition in the ultra-mod-em Beaubourg cultural centre. Perhaps the Russan rejection is the clue to-his continually repeated phrase: “I’m not even sure if I’m a painter”, or the reason that he wants to keep his secrets to himself. He is writing an autobiography — “it’s very difficult” — and it might contain the answer to why blue fishes play the violin and red lampposts walk among the surrealistic synagogues of Vitebsk. Probably not. Louis Aragon is still waiting for an answer to his poem whict asked: “Tell me, Chagall why this music; Tell me Chagnall, what strange language; the painting speaks without speaking ■ • .’’ O.F.N.S. Copyright.