There’s this cow nuzzling a bunch of roses though floating belly up over a matchwood village where smoke springs from every blessed chimney and a po-faced couple issues forth, poised either to sink back among the onion domes or zoom to the far corner where the Eiffel Tower teeters on two legs in moonlit snow.
This isn’t an actual Chagall but it could well be. A late concoction of heart-warming bits melded together and overlaid with memories of a chortling Topol, or the scene in Notting Hill when the Julia Roberts character goes and gives the Hugh Grant character a Chagall original, a love token that he all too understandably mistakes for a framed reproduction.
The trouble with generic Chagalls is that their sticky profusion supplanted Chagall’s one-time originality. Chagall, Schmagall… from birthday to heyday, the name itself loops the loop in biographical airspace. Born Movsha Khatskelev-Movsha, brought up as Moshka or Moyshe Shagal, he was successively Moise Schagalov or Schagalloff, or Chagaloff, or Chagalsky, until, the better to register as a luminary of the Ecole de Paris, he decided to be forever Marc Chagall.
Hailing him ‘pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters’, Jackie Wullschlager credits Chagall with, above all, the ability to blend. ‘A chameleon who never quite felt he belonged anywhere’, he was, she argues — persuasively up to a point — a painter of outstanding assimilatory panache. ‘His unique genius was to fuse Russian, Jewish and French traditions.’ Among Russian painters he was distinguished for being one of the first to combine iconic and rustic, namely ‘the easygoing ways of the country, its earthy yet tender acceptance of the interdependence of man and beast’, coupled with imagery fixed yet dwindling in the rear-view mirror of memory. He and Bella, his first wife and emotional tether, were reared in Hasidic ways, hot on communal song and dance; it was thanks to Bella, and the two or three other dominant women in his life (his mother and his second wife, Vava), that he developed, over decades, the dual persona of cranky genius and henpecked lost boy leading the world a rooftop dance. Wullschlager notes that the student Chagall tried reddening his lips and darkening his eyes to attract girls. This was not a success. Not being by nature a little red rooster, he worked on his artistic charm and employed it to help himself to marry well. ‘Chagall’s instinct as a social climber never deserted him in love.’
Comments
There are currently no comments for this article.