Exhibitions
Chagall: Love and the Stage (Royal Academy, till 4 October)
Rare delight
Andrew Lambirth
The expectant visitor arriving in the Royal Academy's Sackler Galleries should proceed straight through Gallery III to Gallery I to find the vast and remarkable painting at the heart of this excellent new Chagall show. Entitled 'Introduction to the Jewish Theatre', it measures more than 25 feet in length. It was painted in tempera, gouache and opaque white on canvas in 1920 as a mural for the State Jewish The- atre in Moscow, when Chagall (1887-1985) was living back in Russia after a spell in Paris.
This exhibition focuses on the eight years (1914-22) when Chagall was prevented by the first world war and the Russian Revo- lution from further travel in Europe. He returned to his home town of Vitebsk, mar- ried his childhood fiancée, Bella Rosenfeld, and did much work for the stage; hence the twin themes of this exhibition. With his newly acquired knowledge of the develop- ments of modernism and drawing on Rus- sian and Yiddish folk tales, Chagall created a personal mythology which he conveyed through a richly coloured, fragmented style, an instinctive synthesis of abstraction and figuration. Chagall had no wish to ignore the Russian avant-garde leanings towards a pure geometrical abstraction (Malevich and Kandinsky), but he was also successful in utilising the multiple view- points of Cubism. The results are truly effective.
`Introduction to the Jewish Theatre' is a vast panorama of theatre types featuring pantomime cows and fiddlers on various roofs, some even doing the splits. For many years the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow denied the existence of this can- vas, and it was left rolled up (presumably not in very good condition) in some base- ment. One can only speculate on how much it has been restored, but it looks very fresh today, full of intricate poetic drawing and prismatic colour. It is packed with con- centrated (and sometimes overlaid) inci- dent, yet with big open spaces for the picture to breathe. It is like a gazetteer of Chagallian imagery: the drinker, the beard- ed goat, acrobats, a man riding a cockerel, the eccentric umbrella-wielder, a self-por- trait with palette, the postman and waiter. The violin, a classic prop of Cubist still-life, is put here to new and dynamic use. Besides the delicacy of the drawing there is a great variety of pattern and texture. Above all, it is a sophisticated and con- trolled composition. Chagall is never naive.
`My symbolic poetry is unexpected, ori- ental, suspended between China and Europe . ..' he once announced. Look at `Love on the Stage', hanging to the left. It's a paler, subtler painting, full of half-discs and angles, the imagery adumbrated in soft greys with lace-print patterning. It evinces extraordinary control of very restricted means, where every curlicue and sweep of the brush, every suggested cylinder or diag- onal, is rendered poignant. The drawing of the faceted faces of the lovers is exquisite. On the third wall of Gallery I hang four vertical panels representing respectively Music, Dance, Drama and Literature, with a horizontal over-panel of a banqueting table. Chagall's great graphic skill is once more in evidence, as well as a Brueghel- like relish for the depiction of man's earthy nature (characters regularly empty bowels or bladder in these pictures).
Gallery II is altogether less interesting. It contains set and costume designs which, out of their context, always seem to lack something — the performance which they go towards enabling, that crucial element of live theatre. Nevertheless, there are some good designs and finished pictures which demonstrate again Chagall's mastery of colour. (Remark the electric blue seen through a window in 'Clock', lighting up a symphony in yellow.) The small gouaches provide a welcome opportunity to experi- ment with texture and pattern. They're also vehicles for Chagall's quaint humour — the disappearing legs in the set design for Sholem Aleichem's Its a Lie, for example.
Back now into Gallery III, to discover a superb Indian ink drawing called 'Lovers in Black': he's got one eye open (ecstatic? Despairing? Plotting? Predatory?), while she is angular and intent on feeding off him. This drawing launches a series of paintings of lovers in pink, green and blue which have a charming lyrical tenderness. The images explore the lovers' awareness of each other (in one, the girl's head com- pletely obscures the boy's); remaining dreamy, they are yet deeply sexualised. Hanging opposite is the tremendous paint- ing of the floating elongated couple called `Over the Town'. Its companion piece is `Over Vitebsk', another flying figure mas- terpiece, with echoes of Delaunay and Parisian modernism in the towers and roofs on the right. To end the exhibition are the very fine 'Poet Reclining' from the Tate, and the wild and brilliant 'Promenade' from the State Russian Museum, St Peters- burg. Just contemplate the patterned red picnic rug at bottom left, and the blue leaves on the tree above. A fitting note of high colour with which to conclude.
Although this exhibition concentrates on only one period of Chagall's long life, it does more than hint at his range of quirky narrative brilliance and formal inventive- ness. A useful and elegantly written intro- duction to the whole career is Chagall by Gill Polansky, newly published by Phaidon at the very competitive price of f5.95, and A gazetteer of Chagallian imagery: 'Introduction to the Jewish Theatre; 1920 by Marc Chagall containing 48 carefully selected colour plates. The RA's own sumptuous cata- logue, published in association with Mer- rell Holberton, is priced at £14.95. A stunning exhibition and a rare delight.
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