Marc Chagall - Fiddlers and floating brides

What is artistic success? Marc Chagall rose from obscurity in the Jewish Pale of tsarist Russia to become a multimillionaire and global art celebrity. He was a young star wherever new art was hot: Paris in 1911-12; revolutionary Russia; early-1920s Berlin. Popular taste canonised him in old age as a founder, with Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, of French modernism. Patrons for his big public commissions included the Catholic church, the Israeli state, the Rockefellers, the Paris opera and the United Nations.

A strong-minded mother and a succession of three attentive wives ensured him unbroken feminine care. A political naïf, he left it to luck to waltz him clear of Bolshevik hard men in Soviet Russia and of anti-Semitic policemen in Vichy France. At ease under the sunshine of Provence in 1985, a painless heart attack felled him at the age of 97 after a quiet day in the studio.

A jammy life, you might think on finishing Jackie Wullschlager’s first-rate biography. And in a sense it was. Smiling out at us in photographs of the old man is not someone racked by might-have-beens but a white-haired faun with twinkling eyes. Ms Wullschlager, art critic for the Financial Times (owned by Pearson, as this newspaper partly is too), gives us sympathetically and in full a man whom friends and rivals alike remembered for his gentle charm.

“Chagall: A Biography” also looks hard at the work. Here the image of enchanted genius and Chagall’s actual achievement begin to slip apart. Though Ms Wullschlager is fair and never sneering about his painting after he left Russia for ever in 1922, she is firm that his art was never as good again.

Till then he combined Russian and French art in unique scenes of shtetl life at once realistic and magical, personal and archetypical, with floating brides, upside-down people, fiddlers on roofs and calves in cow’s bellies. When in 1912 Guillaume Apollinaire saw Chagall’s dreamlike images at his Montparnasse studio, he murmured, according to Chagall, “Surnaturel”. The phrase went round Paris, surrealism acquired an origin myth and Chagall’s reputation was made.

Back in Russia, at his home town of Vitebsk and then in St Petersburg (then called Petrograd), he worked on through war and revolution with equal fire, using cardboard when canvas was scarce. Then things go suddenly and permanently wrong. Artistic grace vanishes as mysteriously as it came. Chagall never lost his feel for colour. But structure, content and invention weaken calamitously. Without claiming to explain what probably nobody can explain, Ms Wullschlager records Chagall’s artistic slide into repetition, pastiche and sentimentality.

There are still almost 70 years, close on half the book, to go. But having read her wonderful evocation of Jewish Vitebsk, tsarist St Petersburg and modernist Paris, having lived as in a novel with the Hasidic families of Chagall and Bella Rosenfeld, his first wife, the reader will be hooked.

Vivid personalities, constant upheavals and Chagall’s scarcely believable blunders make for barely a dull page. In the graphic work he did between the wars for his dealer-friend, Ambroise Vollard—illustrations to Gogol, La Fontaine and the Bible—grace intermittently returns.

Chagall welcomed the Russian revolution, but found himself a clay jug among iron pots. He ran a Bolshevik art school in Vitebsk with Kasimir Malevich and Lazar El Lissitzky, two avant-garde tough nuts who bullied him out of his director’s job. Back in Moscow he slipped from one precarious commission to another. In Vitebsk synagogues closed. The secret police raided Bella’s family jewellery shop. At her prodding, the couple joined Russia’s cultural exodus, to Berlin and then Paris.

Precious work Chagall had left behind before the war was gone. Some he had trusted to a Berlin dealer, the rest he had stored in his Paris studio behind a door tied with string. He set to recreating what he had lost. Many Chagalls on museum walls are his 1920s copies. He wrote a memoir of his youth. Already he was looking back.

Blithe to Stalin, Chagall sent a reckless letter in 1937 to his art teacher in Vitebsk that probably cost the old man his life at the hands of the secret police. Blind to danger, Chagall lingered in France until July 1941. The day that he and Bella left Marseille for America, the Vichy police deported 1,200 other Jewish refugees there to forced labour in north Africa.

Bella’s sudden death in 1944 left Chagall, who had no English, quite helpless. He married again, divorced and married a lasting helpmate for old age, Vava Brodsky. Bella was Chagall’s muse. Vava was his manager, turning the studio—with his backing—into a business. Picasso, who did not like Chagall’s work, teased him about his high prices.

His shrewder friends recognised strategy in Chagall’s innocence. Ms Wullschlager notes it too, but likes him nonetheless. For the under-documented early years she leans inevitably on his inventive “My Life” (1931). Later she has family letters and interviews to rely on.

Though not claiming to explain the later failures, Ms Wullschlager hints at three conditions for the early success. Those conditions came happily together in Chagall’s wonder years of 1911-17: new idioms in art, the persistence of Hasidic life in the shtetl, and an artist who found distance enough to reconfigure that life in the universal medium of paint. There is no proof in such matters, but Ms Wullschlager’s idea is very plausible—and sends you back to Chagall’s unique youthful burst of colour and invention.

Chagall: A Biography By Jackie Wullschlager
Knopf; 608 pages; $40. Allen Lane; £30

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From The Economist print edition

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