ART
BRIDAL couples in their exaltation take off like rockets and float amid the stars ; lamps hang in the night sky ; fishes have fiddles and the cow jumps over the moon. In this land of dream and reverie, where the possible and the impossible go hand-in-hand, where asses are green and skies are violet and houses are as often upside-down as not, it is a matter of no great moment to lose one's head, for the silly thing is obviously quite happy on its own and double heads can be grown by any milkmaid. The England that produced the Elizabethan poets, Blake, Lear and Alice in Wonderland should not find it hard to bring to the work of Chagall now at the Tate a suspension of belief in the natural laws. Yet the intellect is often baffled by the same images received through the eye as delight it through the ear. For Chagall is a poet. He is not a literary painter in the anecdotic sense, but rather creates a visual poetry of dissociated literary images. It is for this reason, of course, that he has been called a Surrealist.
Actually the gentle conceits of Chagall are as far removed from the paranoic fetiches of Surrealist iconography as they are from the uncouth rhetoric of the German Expressionists who also claimed him for their own. He remains—merely Chagall. He is a Russian and a Jew, and is both intensely. His only allegiance is to the intellectual freedom and stimulus of Paris. He borrowed, to be sure, from Cubism some of its more superficial mannerisms—which have re- mained with him until recently as a welcome source of strength— but by its analytical basis he was completely unaffected. Faced by seventy-three paintings that cover a period of forty years, one sees that, in one sense, Chagall has been painting the same picture all his life. Again and again and again the same symbols appear and re- appear—the clock with the pendulum, the candelabra the bouquet, the fiddler (he was sitting on the roof even in 1908), ;he Rabbi, the lovers which are himself and his wife, united with the asses the cattle, the pigs and the poultry, and all other living things. All asses, compulsive memories of the village near Vitebsk, where he was born, seen through the darkened glass of his racial heritage, are, however, but the notes of the scale from which Chagall composes his many- sided music, now a peasant dance, now a threnody, now a song of praise. In the more recent work the rather wistful and melancholy joy- ousness is shot more deeply with sadness. The organisation of the composition is at once softer and more nebulous. But if these later paintings lack the sinews of the more conscious early ones the images are still held in balance by the delicacy of the paint, by the ever resonant and almost Oriental colour (has any other painter subdued with such assurance the notoriously difficult problems in- volved in the use of violet and purple ? ) and, above all, by the innocence and completeness of C.hagall's belief in his personal myth.
I have no space to write of the ballet designs and the great series of illustrations commissioned by Vollard—themselves a major con- tribution to the graphic art of the century. But the great Arts Council exhibition at the Tate is the largest and most comprehensive ever to be seen here, and is another triumphant justification for the
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