Arts
Old charmer
Richard Shone
Chagall (The Royal Academy until 31 March) what does bodybuilder Schwarzeneg- ger do with his earnings and spare time? According to a Standard interview recently he collects sculpture and pictures, and lithographs by Dali and Chagall. Both painters have always had this enormous popular appeal from which they are unlike- ly to recover. But alongside Dali's insi- dious qualities and publicity stunts, Char- gall appears disarmingly benign. His vi- sions of pretty poverty have long appealed to the rich; they depend on him for sweetness as we depend on Tate and Lyle. For fifty years or more Chagall has worked as his own destroyer through a prom- iscuous outpouring of cows and oxen, bouquets and lovers. There is plenty of all that at the Royal Academy but there are also enough good early pictures there to remind us what a talent he had before he became the grand old Sugar Daddy of modern painting.
But where does this mass appeal lie? How often do acknowledged critical sta- ture and popularity go together? Often, in artists of the past; less frequenty when it comes to this century. Who are the really popular fine artists of the postwar years? They have included Dufy, Buffet, Lowry, Dali, Chagall, Magritte, Modigliani, Utril- lo, Hockney. It is an extraordinarily varied list — just look at the first two, one the master of decorative spontaneity, the other, artist-in-residence to the Age of Anxiety. What superficial melancholy in human beings led to the Age of Anxiety? What superficial melancholy in human beings led to the mass espousal of Utrillo's shutters, streets and squares? The work of all these artists is pitched at an extreme — of chic in Hockney, horror in Dali, erotic- ism in Modigliani. They discovered a for- mula as well as a style and all are instantly recognisable. Of course, they come and go — Utrillo's star has sunk below the hori- zon; Lowry is dimmed though fairly steady. As for Chagall, his popularity is perhaps shifting but, to judge from the crowds at the Royal Academy, he still has the power to attract, please and intrigue. The Academy, as we know, likes to have a success on its hands (however uncomfort- able for the visitor).
Marc Chagall is very old — 97 in fact — and quietly slipping away, still painting, in the South of France, not far from where Renoir, another great popular artist, died in 1919. We have to go back to before that year to get at the essence of Chagall, to find the source of what was to follow and to discover those works which will ensure his future standing if not his popularity. They are in the first three rooms at the Academy. It is there that Chagall's lyricism is newly-minted, at its most charming, wayward and inspired. At the same time, his cosmopolitan use (if not complete understanding) of the European move- ments he experienced at first hand, was at its most inventive. The early lugubrious Russian paintings are authentic in spirit if nothing else, influenced by Gauguin and Van Gogh. Then comes the wonderful freedom of his first narrative pictures of peasant life — a fair, a wedding, a lying-in — in which Chagall tosses perspective and colour about like a rag doll. From here on he can be seen to owe much to the 18th- and 19th-century Russian chapbooks and broadsheets which were also influencing his contemporaries such as Berliuk and Larionov. Figures fall through the skies, a man rides a rooster, flowers loom larger than people who dwarf miniature land- scapes. But it was really only when he had left behind his native Vitebsk and student days in St Petersburg that Chagall, settled in Paris, made a perfect marriage between style and imagery.
He began to create a world which rippled outwards from the persistent image of himself at its centre. His subjects, as Norbert Lynton points out in a catalogue essay, 'outreach any listing' — from clowns to the Eiffel Tower, clocks to crucifixions. And his treatment is as various as his imagery — from works on canvas and paper to ceramics and stained glass. He has become a leading religious painter of the century in murals and windows, an inven- tive stage designer, a prodigal graphic artist. But from the first self-portrait of 1909 with its swaggering, self-confident air to his hovering presence, palette in hand, in a 1983 picture in the last room, Chagall as artist, lover, impresario, peasant con- trols the action or looks on from the wings in much the way Picasso does in his late work. In particular there are three great images of himself. In the famous 'I and the Village', of which there are two versions, the profiles of a cow and the painter confront each other against a scramble of village images. In 'The Birthday' of 1915, an ecstatic young man floats above the floor of his studio with his fiancée who holds a bouquet, the first of innumerable pictures of flowers and lovers; and again of 1915, Chagall shows himself as the satisfied newly-wed in the Tate's famous 'Poet Reclining' with its lovely lilac sky, the moon behind the trees, Chagall as listening poet lying across the foreground.
It becomes clear that Chagall best evoked Russian memories in his studio in
Paris. There he concocted his unique achievement of presenting new subjects through powerful, innovative form. Accusations of eclecticism, of a prog- rammatic assault on all the isms, seem wide of the mark. The cubism of Gleizes and Metzinger, Matisse's colour, Delaunay's orphic structures were immensely influen- tial but he took nothing without purpose; everything nurtured his art. But enforced years in Vitebsk during the First War had a debilitating effect; he was too near the source of his art and by 1919, for example, he was capable of producing a truly awful work such as 'Musician with Violin,' usual- ly in the Tel-Aviv Museum. It was not until 1923 with his return, via Berlin, to France that Chagall seemed to settled once more, though much changed. He becomes the Chagall of popular fame: colour begins to dominate in cloud-like pure areas, des- troying the angularity of his 'cubist' line. We are showered with flowers and brides, dewy-eyed cows playing violins, candles, rooftops and flying angels.
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