The public has always loved his style. Chagall’s cheerful pictures of floating brides and animals have been popular among museumgoers since his first retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art more than 50 years ago. But Chagall has not always been a favorite of art students: no one has aspired to be the “new Chagall.” Art critics have long dismissed him as a sentimentalist whose creativity dried up by the time he was 40.
Now a new show may change their view. “Chagall: Known and Unknown” at the Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris (through June 23) divides the artist’s life into five periods: the Russian years, Jewish theater, the Bible, gallery of fables and the French years. While it features many of his iconic works–including the giddy recollection of his own wedding, “Double Portrait With a Glass of Wine”–the exhibit also contains previously unseen paintings, drawings and collages from private collections. These works, many from the 1930s onward, help track Chagall’s evolution as an artist and a man, and reveal a darkness and a passion few knew he possessed.
Born to Jewish peasants in Vitsybsk, Russia, in 1887, Chagall was the eldest of nine children. Once he completed Jewish elementary school, his mother bribed an official to let him attend the state school, which was off-limits to Jews. There he learned to play violin and draw, and became enamored of the bourgeois lifestyle. In 1906 Chagall won a scholarship to study with the celebrated painter Leon Bakst in St. Petersburg. He began to re-create scenes from his youth in Vitsybsk–peasants, farms, village life–images that would recur in his work until his death in 1985.
In 1910, he received a grant to travel to Paris. “The soil that nourished my art was Vitsybsk,” he later said, “but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water.” So he left his sweetheart, Bella Rosenfeld, in Russia and dove into the bohemian art world of Paris, studying the impressionistic works of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, and befriending the poet Guillaume Apollinaire. He lived in an artist’s colony called La Rouche and fell in with the cubists.
He returned to Vitsybsk to wed Bella in 1914, and began dabbling in surrealism. In “Bella in the White Collar,” his wife hovers like a giant over a forest. “Above Vitsybsk” features a peasant carrying a sack as he flies above the snowy village.
But in “Known and Unknown,” a far more troubled Chagall also emerges. Three pen-and-ink studies of his masterpiece, “The Fall of the Angel” (1923-1947), show a profound anguish–the bull snarls, the bearded man howls– that is softened by color and time in the final painting. Later works reflect upheaval in his personal life; Bella’s death in 1944 drove him to paint “The Green Eye,” in which a spooky giant eye watches a woman milk a blue cow. Cha-gall produced some of his most terrifying works after World War II–most notably “The War” (1964-66), which depicts refugees fleeing as a village burns. Chagall’s reputation may be for painting heaven on earth. But as this exhibit shows, he was just as adept at evoking hell.
