Patrick Bade
Marc Chagall 1887-1985, An Extraordinary Life

Patrick Bade | Marc Chagall 1887-1985, An Extraordinary Life | 06.12.22

• Well we get tonight to the most widely known and loved of all Jewish artists, Marc Chagall. I’m going to concentrate today on the first half of his career, up to the time that he left Russia for the second time in 1922 after the Russian Revolution cause he lived for another 65 years and he was active to the end. And he certainly, he produced many beautiful things in the second half of his career, particularly wonderful stained glass windows and some very impressive decorative schemes. But it does seem to me that his greatest work was really behind him by the time he reached Paris for the second time in 1922. This of course, The Violinist 1913, painted on a damask tablecloth that had been given to him by Bella, his fiance. This is I suppose his most famous and widely reproduced painting. It was the first painting by Chagall that I ever saw. In fact, I suppose it’s one of the first great paintings I remember ever contemplating because my Auntie Nell, who played the violin, she had a reproduction of this picture in her flat.

So he was born in Vitebsk in what is now Belarus in 1887. This is what it looked like at the time. And it was a medium size town with a population of 66,000, half of whom were Jewish. So he grew up in a very Jewish, very observant Jewish background. And I’d like to think for a moment about the date of his birth, 1887, and think who his contemporaries were. So here we have a group of people who were all born within a decade of one another. On the left is Pablo Picasso, who is of course a very, very dominant figure. And they were the last two great figures of Parisian Modernism, Picasso and Chagall. They there were sort of frenemies. They had a slightly tense friendship with an element of rivalry towards the end of the lives when they’d outlived everybody else. Then next in order of birth comes Modigliani, he’s bottom left. He was born in 1884, and above him is Sonya Delaunay. She was born in 1885. So all three of course knew each other in Paris. And then top right. And I always find this absolutely extraordinary and I don’t know what it says about star signs, but that Charlie Chaplin and Hitler were born in the same week in April, 1889. And the last is Soutine born 1893. Bottom right hand side.

One of the striking things about this is that we have four very important Jewish artists born in a kind of cluster within just a few years of one another. And I think this indicates a kind of critical point in the process of Jewish assimilation into Western culture. I suppose it’s the visual arts, which was the last, this was the last area where Jews really became central to western culture and there are obvious reasons for that. Bans on representation in the Bible and so on. And there had in the course of the 19th century up there had only really been two major Jewish artists, you could say were absolutely central to the development of European art and they were of course primarily Pissarro, Camille Pissarro and Max Lieberman. Now suddenly you’ve got four, and then of course you have many, many more in the encore de Paris that I will be talking about in a couple of weeks time. So we’ve reached a point where it’s possible for a Jew, even someone coming from such a religious background as Chagall he had his problems sometimes as a young man. His grandfather for instance, was very, very disapproving of him making paintings. I seem to have frozen. What’s that for? Ah, yes. Here, his parents.

So he grew up in a humble background. His mother owned a grocery shop. His father had a very hard career carrying barrels of herrings for a herring merchant and there were nine children. So they weren’t starving, they weren’t in the most grinding quality, but it was certainly a very humble background. And here you see the family really quite respectably dressed in modern European clothing. The older sister on the left hand side, she’s really quite smartly dressed with her big hat and her feathers. And they lived in this little tiny house. The family occupied that house until after the revolution. So they were in that house for a good 30 years. Chagall discovered his vocation quite early. And he was lucky in being, going and finding a local artist called Yuri Pen, who was very sympathetic to him. Yuri Pen, I suppose you have to say, is a minor artist, although I think that the portrait of Chagall by Yuri Pen on the left hand side, I think it’s a wonderful portrait. Really wonderful, very sensitive. And I have an extraordinary sense not just of likeness, but of a personality that comes through in this picture.

But Yuri Pen is important also because he was the first artist who decided that he wanted to record the daily life of Jews or religious Jews, Hasidic Jews and that’s what he did. And he quickly recognised extraordinary talent of Chagall. Chagall remained devoted to him for the rest of his life. And in a terrible way actually could have been inadvertently responsible for Yuri Pen’s death. At least that’s what Jackie Wullschlager thinks, who wrote a wonderful biography of Chagall. If you want to take this further, actually I strongly recommend, it’s on the list that you received on the list of names, the biography of Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager. It’s one of the best biographies and artists I think I’ve ever read and it’s a wonderful read. And of course it’s a fascinating life. And she points out that Chagall, after he’d left the Soviet Union in 1922 is in Paris. And in the 1930s he was internationally recognised and very famous. So he was as far as Stalin and the Soviets were concerned, a rather notorious defector. And he wrote a letter to Yuri Pen in 1937.

Of course that was the height of all those terrible Stalin purges, the great terror, expressing a great wish to see him again. And it seems that letter was intercepted and shortly afterwards men came to Yuri Pen’s house and they brutally murdered him in the middle of the night. So Jackie Wullschlager speculates that there may be a connection between Chagall’s very innocent and loving letter and the terrible end of Yuri Pen. Then he goes to St. Petersburg and he signs up for tuition with an artist called Nicholas Roerich. This is his self portrait on the left hand side. Today he’s mainly remembered for the decor that he created for the premiere of Stravinski’s Right of Spring for Diaghilev in 1913. But he was, I think, important for Chagall. First of all, he was very interested in Russian folklore. And as you know, there’s a very strong folkloric element in much of Chagall’s work for the rest of his life. He’s also interested in primitivism, the art of simple people, folk art. And he was very keen on Gauguin and it’s thought that he probably introduced Chagall who cause he’s never left Russia doesn’t really know much about western art, but might have been introduced to the art of Gauguin at this very early stage. And then he moves on to the studio of Leon Bakst.

Of course another artist who’s primarily famous for his association with Diaghilev. And they seemed to have got on well together. And again, I think that Bakst recognised Chagall’s talent and encouraged him. And they certainly maintained contact with one another in later years when they were both living in Paris. So this is one of the first paintings by Chagall that survives. And it shows a funeral in a village and it’s a kind of expressionism. And you see the folkloric elements and the deliberately almost childlike primitive elements in the style. And so he’s like his former teacher and he is exploring and depicting the life of relatively poor Jews in Vitebsk. And this here you can see is the village wedding. So 1909, a very important event in his life. He, in the street, he bumped into a girl called Bella Rosenfeld. She was also Jewish of course, but she was from a better part of town. Her parents were really quite wealthy. Her mother owned a jewellery shop. And you can see she’s very beautiful too, I think both from his portrait and from this photograph of the two of them at the time of their engagement. Of course, I think Bella Rosenfeld, she must have been a very determined woman because clearly Chagall was not the kind of person that her family would’ve wanted her to marry.

He was not somebody with great prospects. But she was determined. She went through with the engagement. Not only that, he then promptly left very soon afterwards and went off to Paris and they did not see each other for four years. But they, well, I dunno if you remained faithful to her, but she certainly remained faithful to him. And they were, of course, eventually married when he came back to Russia in the first World War and she died long before him, and he had two more marriages. But this was a long lasting marriage till her death in 1944. And it’s difficult even really to think of him having the career he had without her extraordinary support for him in every possible way. Anyway, he decides he’s got to go to Paris. I think artists must have been thinking this all over the world in the early 1900s, if you didn’t want to remain provincial and unimportant, you wanted to be cutting edge, you wanted to be at the centre of things, of course you have to go to Paris. So this young man who probably didn’t speak a word of French, it’s a bold thing, a great adventure, he was given a small pension by a wealthy Russian art collector, enough for him just to live on.

So he wasn’t facing utter destitution or starvation, but it still must have been an incredible adventure to all that distance from St. Petersburg, Vitebsk to come all the way to Paris. He would’ve landed up at the Galino, which you see here and is still there of course, unchanged. And he took by this point, the Parisian avant garde have upticks from Montmartre and they’ve all crossed the river and they’re all living in . So this is where he goes. And he would certainly have met plenty of Russian speakers and plenty of Yiddish speakers. This were really the Ecole de Paris he is beginning to thrive. Ecole de Paris of course is a very much a kind of misnomer. The school of Paris, since none of the Ecole de Paris artists were hardly any of them actually came from Paris and very few of them were French and a very, very high proportion of them were Jewish and mainly from Eastern Europe. So he’s immediately in the thick of things. What we see between 1910 and 1914 is that he’s avid for new experiences. He’s looking around him, he’s picking up new styles, he’s borrowing left, right and centre. And again, I’d like to use my favourite Picasso quote, which is only bad artists borrow, good artists steal.

In the painting on the left, which Chagall painted soon after his arrival in his studio, right next the you could still say that he’s borrowing rather than stealing. The distinction I’m making here is that a great artist like Picasso can lift ideas and techniques from other artists and they immediately become, they become his, he totally appropriates them. And you are no longer really particularly aware of where the borrowing has come from. I think the painting on the left hand side, you can see that Chagall has discovered fauvism, he’s discovered above all Matisse. So this is a painting of 1910, and on the left is a Matisse of I think 1905 or 1906. So just a couple of years earlier. And the similarities in technique, the very bright colours applied flatly, this is all very obvious. Yeah, he’s got this small studio, I suppose rather important prop is an armchair. And we can see the same armchair in this picture of it looks like a woman painting, but I think it’s a model, again in his studio in .

So he then moves to the famous LaRouche at the Beehive. LaRouche, the Beehive. This extraordinary structure was designed by Gustav Eiffel of the famous Eiffel Tower and it was actually designed as a wine store for the Paris World Exhibition of 1900. And when it was no longer needed for that purpose, it was dismantled and re-erected and turned into cheap artists accommodation and studios. And it must have been a quite amazing place to be amongst Chagall’s contemporaries in La Ruche, there was Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Soutine, Max Jacob and the poets Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars. So you can imagine there must have been lots of very intense and stimulating conversations going on in that building. It still exists. You can see the outside of it, it’s very close to the , but sadly, I suppose inevitably, it’s been converted into luxury flats. So he’s really on an exciting journey in these four years as he’s absorbing all these new ideas. And to show you how rapidly he changes, I want to show you two paintings of the same subject, paintings of a birth.

The childbirth is actually a surprisingly rare subject in western art but Chagall was fascinated by it and painted it several times. So this is 1910, just before he goes to Paris in this rather primitive style with some expressionist elements. Then we see this is the same subject two years later in 1912 and it’s very evident that he’s discovered cubism. Cubism is the great revolution, very important revolution in early modern art initiated by Picasso and Brock 1908, 1909. And then very it quickly picked up by many other artists, Leger, Andre Lords, lots of artists who pick up cubism and run with it and do all sorts of different things with it. And this is, the disrupted space, the angularity of this shows that Chagall is fully aware of cubism, but by this painting I think is it’s really him, isn’t it? It’s completely Chagall. He’s appropriated cubism and he’s made it his own. And he’s looking around at the different types of cubism. This painting on the left hand side is called The Drunkard and it dates from 1912. It’s on the left hand side.

On the right hand side, you can see that the brightly coloured version of cubism that was created by Beauford Delaney, he called it Orphism. And you get these sort of almost veils of bright colour and a sort of prismatic effect. And it gets pretty obvious that Chagall is very aware of this and is taking up these ideas. So this painting is called, I suppose it shows that he’s still thinking about Bella Rosenfeld who’s waiting for him back in Vitebsk. It’s called I And My Fiance. And you can see they’re completely chopped up and in cubist manner and space and form are quite disrupted That he’s always different from the early cubism of Pablo Picasso which is more or less monochromatic in that colour is a very, he’s always a great colorist and even right to the very end of his life paintings which sometimes to me look bland as images but the colour is always gorgeous. He’s a great colorist. Picasso acknowledged that Chagall was the greatest colorist of the Brazilian modernists. And here again you can see, I think that by this time he’s also aware of the second phase of Picasso Brock’s cubism.

First phase is where everything is shattered and broken down. And then the collage phase, that’s synthetic cubism. There are quite collage like elements in this picture that he’s picked up from synthetic cubism. And this is a painting called Adam and Eve. And as I said, he’s looking around at everything, borrowing from everything. This is a slightly unusual painting. You might not even necessarily recognise it as a Chagall. And it shows him looking at a group of cubists who are known as the the Golden Section, the section door. And he’s I think very much a torn figure in these years between 1910 and 1912. This painting is called I and The Village. So there he is in the middle of Paris at the heart of modernism and this great urban centre surrounded by all these intellectuals and modern artists, but he’s still thinking back to his village. And there’s a very nostalgic element I would say to this picture. So you think these are painted at more or less the same time. Here he is in folkloric mode, nostalgic mode, thinking about Jewish life in Vitebsk. And here he is absolutely at the heart of modern Peruvian intellectual life.

And you can see the names inscribed on bottom left around the heart with the arrow through it. We’ve got the names of Apollinaire and Ricciotto Canudo who is an Italian intellectual and critic. Herwarth Walden who’ll talk more about in a minute, who was a very important dealer in modern art and promoter of modern art and the poet Blaise Cendrars. So this shows you the sort of people he’s mixing with, but at the same time, he’s again, he’s very much engaged with his memory of Jewish life. I suppose there’s no reason why he shouldn’t have seen rabbis and orthodox Jews in Paris. There were plenty there if he wanted to paint them. Again, a very peruviana painting with something that we’re going to see very much of though in later in his work, these weightless flying figures, somebody who seems to be flying up to the Eiffel Tower in the background. The Eiffel Tower, which was the great symbol of modernism, great symbol of hope for the new century. I always say cause it’s the greatest irony is that the Eiffel Tower was open to the public in the week that Hitler was born in April, 1889.

So that little baby born in Austria in 1889 ensured that the Eiffel Tower wouldn’t fulfil its promise of progress, prosperity, brotherhood of man for the 20th century. And again for comparison, we’ve got Chagall on the left hand side and we’ve got Robert Delaunay on the right hand side. This is self-portrait with six fingers where I think he, in this picture he’s expressing his, in a way divided personality. And you’ve got the Eiffel Tower on the left hand side and all that represents of modernism and Paris. But you can see on the right hand side he’s in a cloud, really, you’ve got his memory of village life in Belarus. So 1914, he in a very timely way, decides to go back to Russia. And on the way he stops in Berlin, and he’s taken up by this man whose name, or he called himself Herwarth Walden. He wanted to give himself a very Germanic name. His real name was Georg Lewin. He was Jewish as so many of the movers and shakers and major dealers and collectors of modern art were. And there’s a lot about him. If you want to read more about him I recommend once again, Charles Dellheim’s wonderful book, Belonging and Betrayal.

But one of the points I discussed with Charles Dellheim when I interviewed him was the double meaning really of betrayal in the title of his book. Of course the primary meaning was that those Jews who had embraced modern western culture, embraced modernism, were eventually betrayed when Hitler came along. But there were quite a number of little betrayals in that book, one could say between Jews and certainly Herwarth Walden treated Chagall, as we shall see eventually, he really did betray him. He offered him his first- Herwarth Walden had set up a gallery in 1910 called Dersturm. And it was probably the most exciting modern art gallery in Europe for those years just leading up to the first World War. And he was interested in all new tendencies. He was interested in cubism, he was interested in expressionism, he was interested in futurism. And he immediately saw the quality of Chagall’s art and he offered him his first ever one man show. Took place in Berlin in 1914. So you’d think, ooh, terrible timing, outbreak of the first World War, but actually the show was a smash success and it completely sold out. But unfortunately, Chagall never got any profit from it.

He was well and truly shafted by Herwarth Walden and of course initially he couldn’t actually pay Chagall cause Chagall was in Russia on the other side in the First World War. But when Chagall turned up after the war to say, yeah, how about, you know, all that money you made from my pictures? I’m afraid he got next to nothing from Herwarth Walden. So back in Vitebsk. And this is a painting which in a way celebrates that return to Vietsbk with this figure of a wandering Jew floating over the town. This could see maybe his return from wandering for four years. And it also apparently refers to the biblical prophet Elias. And so this period from 1914 up to 1922, it seems to me he has reached a full maturity as an artist. He’s done all these experimental, cutting edge, very interesting paintings in Paris. He’s now completely himself and to my mind, the greatest paintings he did are done in this period from 1914 to 1922. And this, as you can see, is a painting of a pious Jewish man. He actually, he had trouble getting people to pose for his pictures, I suppose because of the reluctance of Hasidic Jews to be depicted, but he managed to persuade this elderly man to sit for him and he borrowed his own father’s prayer shawl for this picture.

So of course coming back there was the faithful Bella Rosenfeld, she was still waiting for him and they married and it was a tremendously happy marriage. And he paints a whole series of these pictures were the two of them are floating through air and this floating seems to represent the ecstasy of their married life. Here’s another one of these pictures. They’re such joyous pictures. They really, I think they’re tremendously life enhancing pictures. And this one with the wine glass and the angel, purple angel. It’s funny, even at this point he sometimes mixes Christian imagery with the Jewish imagery and this painting of where raising the wine glass and the angel coming down. Of course, it’s a reference to the annunciation to the Virgin Mary that she’s pregnant and this painting was painted to celebrate the conception of their daughter Eda. The elongated figures and the rather ecstatic quality of the painting might remind of El Greco, an artist who was much discussed by, he’d really been rediscovered right at the end of the 19th century and embraced by many, many modern artists, particularly expressionists as a kind of honorary modern artist. So I’m sure that Chagall was very aware of El Greco.

The honeymoon was spent in a dacha in the countryside outside of Vitebsk and this is a picture that was painted during the honeymoon. And there are other pictures of this time that show the local countryside, this presumably Chagall and Bella looking out the window at the silver birches. And oh, they have such a lyrical quality to them. You could say they’re decorative, but they’re decorative in the best possible way. And to me there’s a wonderful fusion of observation of reality, observation of life and fantasy and imagination. This was painted with Lily of the Valley to celebrate the birth of the daughter Eda. And there he follows from her birth, again a painting which where the iconography has I think reminiscences of Christian iconography and we can follow the very early steps of Eda’s childhood. And paintings that show I think that he was one of those artists who didn’t see a contradiction between creativity and domesticity. This was a sort of a very wide held belief.

George Bernachore talks about it, that the creative artist that it is his life, the domestic life being surrounded by a wife and children and domesticity is inimical to creativity. This is clearly not something that Chagall felt. And I’d like to show you two paintings by a British artist. A new contemporary artist who died six years ago, who I admire very much, that show in a way the opposite side of the coin. This is Francis West. He was a lovely, very gentle man. I knew him very well as a very good friend. But he was I think very conflicted. I think he actually felt at the end of his life that he had neither really fulfilled himself as an artist nor and he also felt very guilty cause he didn’t feel he’d really fulfilled his duty as a husband and a father. So he clearly felt there was some kind of conflict between domesticity and creativity. This is a painting, as I said, a very unusual subject. There are not many artists in western art who’ve dealt with the subject of birth.

This is a painting by Francis West, which actually I have here in this house in London. And this is a painting which I have in my flat in Paris, which rather more explicitly expresses this conflict. And it shows him, in fact, you see him three times over in this picture. A painting on the wall. You see him actually drawing and there is a bust on the right hand side. And he called it The Artist in Search of His Identity. And it clearly shows his wife and the two daughters and the two daughters are like little animals were breastfeeding. So it’s a deeply felt painting. But one day he came to me and he said to me, will you take this painting, I have to get it out of my house because my daughters really hate it so much. Anyway, back to Chagall and Bella. And you can see that this is a painting that is based on a photograph that he took off her, but there’s nothing photographic about it. It’s in no way a slavish copy of the photograph. And it gives a tremendous sense, I suppose it’s the scale, the way she towers over the plants or trees whatever they are at the bottom have a tremendous sense of her power as a woman.

Many paintings of Vitebsk around this time I suppose, I dunno how much of Vitebsk of his day survived the Second World War. But so these are paintings again, which combine observation of reality, what was around him, with a tremendous sense of imagination and fantasy. This shows the Jewish cemetery and it has of course the Hebrew, I can’t read Hebrew, but many of you will be able to read it and will know that this is a text from Ezekiel and the text reads in English, I will open up your graves and cause you to come out of your graves and bring you into the land of Israel. So it’s a painting which makes me think of the most famous painting of Stanley Spencer, which is the Cookham Resurrection, which is of course inspired by the very same text of the people coming out of their graves. And you could say, I think there are really interesting parallels between Stanley Spencer and Chagall.

You could make a very interesting exhibition I think drawing those parallels. You could almost see Stanley Spencer as an English equivalent, an artist with an incredible personal vision, a kind of mystical approach to the subject matter who has also borrowed some elements of modernism. One critic said of this painting of the Stanley Spencer, that it looked like a cubist had shaken hands with a pre-raphaelite. And you could almost say the same I think of the Chagall on the left hand side. So revolution breaks out and I think initially probably like most artists, he was in sympathy with the aims of the Russian Revolution. Glad to see the back of a monarchy which had been so antisemitic and responsible for such harsh and cruel treatment of Russian Jews. And he was made commissar for the arts in the Vitebsk.

And it was a role that he embraced with great enthusiasm and he was in charge of the local Art Academy. You see the building which still exists and on the right a rather interesting painting which I would really describe as being a synthetic cubist painting. Although it’s entirely painted, it’s conceived as a collage cause there is this tremendous spring you could say of creativity in Russia that’s unleashed by the first phase of the Russian Revolution with very exciting experimentalism going on El Lissitzky. Malevich. A whole lot of cubic futurist artists doing this kind of huge outburst of creative energy. But within that there was also a lot of factionalism and Chagall in his really quite important position as commissar of the arts found himself in conflict with the more radical modernism of Malevich and El Lissitzky. Oh, here you can see the picture of The Academy. Now there is Malevich who is developing a very radical version of obstruction, which he called suprematism.

Everything reduced to its most basic and simple elements as you can see from the cross. Malevich was very mystical, but it’s a Christian form of mysticism. The painting on the left by Chagall, again not a typical one. You wouldn’t necessarily recognise it as Chagall if it weren’t signed, but I like it very much cause I think he’s actually really taking the piss out of the pretensions of Malevich, putting this goat, these representational elements in among these very supremitist abstract elements. And the same here with this really quite radically simple abstracted image, but the playful element. I’d love to know precisely what was going through his mind when he put these goats into these pictures. And he’s still an artist who’s willing to learn. He’s still an artist who’s looking around at what other artists are doing. And here we actually have a collage on the left hand side that this is by Chagall on the left and on the right a collage by the German dada artist Kurt Whitters whose work Chagall knew and greatly admired Kurt Whitters of course came he or although not Jewish, he was had to flee the Nazis into this country and was interned on the Olive Man like my auntie Edith, she was also interned on the Olive Man.

I was just having a discussion with my sister the other day. At our age, you sort of think, oh, why didn’t I ask more questions when I was young? And I’ve always regretted, oh, I wish I could have asked my Auntie Eddie, did you meet Kurt Whitters? Did you meet the Amadeus Quartet on the . Anyway, I think that Chagall was in a way exhausted and disillusioned by the infighting, the backstabbing, the intrigue in his role as commissar of the arts in Vitebsk So he gives that up and he goes to Moscow and he’s associated for a time with the Jewish Theatre in Moscow. And this is his design for a big mural for the auditorium cause the Russian Revolution went through various phases. Somebody asked me, I think it was last week, if all those singers who fled from Russia, those imperial singers who fled from Russia, was it anti-Semitism? No, it wasn’t. The anti-Semitism came into the revolution later. I mean initially of course many of the leading revolution were Jewish. I’m sure Trudy has talked about that to you many, many times.

And they were quite in keen to encourage Jewish cultural identity and this theatre in Moscow was part of that. This is the design, as I said, for a huge mural. It was actually 12 metres long and four metres high. And of course, later things became more repressive, both for Jews and for avant garde artists and this theatre was repressed and closed down. And miraculously Chagall’s, this is a detail of the actual mural, and the whole thing survives. It was rolled up somewhere survives and I got to see it, it must be about four or five years ago, there was a big Chagall exhibition in Paris that was brought over for that exhibition. In Moscow he was also involved with a Jewish orphanage. And you see him on the steps of the orphanage with the other members of staff of the orphanage. Now by 1922, the Russian Revolution had in many ways turned sour. And there were many people who initially were very hopeful, very optimistic, who became disillusioned and decided that they needed to leave and Chagall was one of them.

They had quite an adventurous escape as so many people did, but they came back through Berlin. And here you can see Herwarth Walden and his wife Nelly sitting, I don’t know what date this was taken, it might be a couple of years earlier, could be caught on the wall you can see two large paintings by Chagall, but Chagall to his great disappointment found that the only way that he was going to get anything out of her Herwarth Walden, he was paid, I mean the sum in marks German mark that the pictures had been sold for before the war, but being paid for, of course as you know, there was this incredible rampant inflation, 1922. So you needed a wheelbarrow of money to buy a loaf. So all that Herwarth Walden would offer him was completely worthless money and he found that he got absolutely nothing from it. But here he is back in Paris with Bella and with Eda, and he reestablishes himself as a major figure in the Ecole de Paris And the work is still to me has a very lovely quality in the 1920s.

And I think part of the problem was the same for composers like Rachmaninoff and Glazunov, artists who had very deep roots in their native land that in some way they were diminished when they left. And certainly memory of the Vitebsk, memory of his childhood continues to play a very important role here. You could see, I think you could see really how that this very, very loving relationship that he had with Bella and his is a photograph, I suppose, of the late 1920s. And here he’s painting a portrait of her. And there this is portrait. Still a very beautiful woman in the 1920s. And I think I’m going to stop here and open up and see how the questions are going. As I said, I do have all these images. Maybe I’ll just talk about a couple of them. This is a picture that he painted in 1933, perhaps it’s called Solitude and this could be 1933, rise of Hitler, maybe expressing a sense of isolation.

But by the thirties, to my mind, I mean this is certainly a charming picture, but the painting loses some of its grittiness. Quite literally it loses its edge because it becomes, he adopts as rather fuzzy and and decorative star. We also find him strangely, although he certainly never renounces his religion and never adopts Christianity, but it is strange how in the period following Kristallnacht and during Second World War and the Holocaust, he adopts a lot of Christian imagery. Here you see Christ, of course wearing a Jewish prayer shawl as a loin cloth and it’s a painting where you can see refugees, you can see burning villages, you can see a burning synagogue with a brown shirt in front of it. So this is really quite, I suppose, a direct, this is painting of the end of 1938. So I think it’s a direct response to Kristallnacht here he is in south of France with Varian Fry. Varian Fry, this great hero, who rescued so much of the intelligentsia and the artistic elite of Europe, got them to America, took great risks to do that.

A really amazing guy. And Chagall was very, very reluctant to leave. He really didn’t want to go to America. And he asked tentatively oh do they have trees and cows in America had to be told, yes, they do have trees and cows in America. Here he is with a whole, just look at this lineup of artists. I dunno if you can read all these names, but this is the Ecole de Paris, it’s the artistic Ecole de Paris. It’s the surrealist movement all now transposed to New York during the Second World War. More pictures painted during the war, which clearly show his response to the situation. I’m going to move on here. And he married, Bella died in 1944. He had a disastrous, fairly brief marriage with this woman called Virginia Hackett. They were married for five years and she left him, so he continues his work I mean well in into his nineties actually. And my feeling is post Second World War his more interesting work is applied art in the sense he did costumes for operas and ballets.

These must be a Firebird. In a way he’s revisiting Diaghilev. This is one of his Firebird costumes. That’s a Bakst one on the right hand side. I think these are Magic Flute costumes and of course he’s commissioned to paint this ceiling for the Paris Opera by Andre Marro. And this is what is underneath it, the original ceiling of the Paris Opera. It’s still there, it’s underneath the Chagall and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. And I’d mentioned these wonderful stained glass windows. This is in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This is in Chester Cathedral. And he’s not the sort of man who could remain single. He needed a woman in his life. And his housekeeper, well became his wife. Her name was Vava Brodsky. And she rather took on the role that Picasso’s final wife took on.

She was, I suppose he’s reached that age where a man wants a wife who’s housekeeper, whose nursemaid and she looked after all the practical things and she protected him from the world and got the reputation for being a bit of a dragon. Here was one of his very last paintings. And this is where he died and where he is buried at St. Paul de Vence somewhat controversially because he did not get a Jewish burial. He was buried in a Christian cemetery. And it was actually, and people have criticised his wife Vava for this, it was pure coincidence that a passer by actually said the Kaddish at his funeral in St. Paul de Vance. So there we are and I’m going to open up and see what people have to say.

Q&A and Comments

Q: Could I please talk about Theo Tobiasse either in this lecture or another one? A: I don’t know. I don’t know enough about it to talk about it I’m afraid.

This is Arlene who visited the Chagall Gallery in Nice a few weeks ago. Yes, well it’s of course a great holiday to do on the all those you Matisse and Octo and Leger and all those artists.

Q: Which of the artists born near Chagall were Jewish? A: Well, I mentioned Sonia Delaunay, Modigliani, Soutine. Those are the most important ones. But of course there are many, many more. Kissling, Shanolof, I’ll be talking about those in a week or so.

This is Mona who is in Vitebsk for the celebration Chagall’s birth and a play put on by the locals. Oh dear. I’m not sure I like that story about the lump of clay on the nose. That is decidedly iffy I would say. Well, I suppose I don’t think Vitebsk was a grand city. And so I suppose and he was actually not born in Vitebsk itself. He was born in a little village outside it. So, but I don’t, I can’t really answer that question. The name of Jackie Wullschlager, all you have to do is bring up what you were sent this morning and the list that I typed out for you and it’s at the bottom of that list. Yes, there are pencil sketches, they’re not usually exhibited in museums. You see them usually in special exhibitions. Any idea why Stalin didn’t- Well, cause Stalin wasn’t around, you know Chagall was studying in St. Petersburg before the First World War. He was there 1908 to 1910, nobody’d heard of Stalin. Stalin was nobody at that point. Monty’s saying he’d read that. I think I’d have to say it’s true. The later work is not considered as good as the early work. But and you are very welcome to disagree with me.

Q: Do you think that Potok’s Asher Lev is based on Chagall? A: I don’t know it so I can’t tell you that. This is right- I in the Village I struggle to incorporate its obvious Jewish components that I couldn’t overlook, but managed to produce a pretty good paper. So nice to be reminded my nascent awakening.

Q: Why are his figures flying? Is there a philosophical reason? A: I don’t think you need a philosophical reason. Flying, you could have a Freudian reason. I’m sure you’ve all had dreams of flying and for most people flying in a dream is a wonderful sense of liberation. I get a really ecstatic feeling from his flying figures in his paintings.

Q: Can I speak why Chagall is featured in Vatican City Museums? How did that come about? A: Well he worked for churches, of course he worked for Cathedral and there’s a little church in Kent that he did. I think he was somebody who felt the relationship of Christianity and Judaism. I’m very happy to know that the Vatican City has paintings by Chagall. Considering the Catholic Church’s horrible record on persecution of Jews and not even pretty dodgy past the 12th and Second World War, it sort of surprises me, but I find it a good thing, a very good thing. After all, the Christians also theoretically believe in the Jewish Bible.

Why he covers his wife’s right eye. I can’t tell you. Elongation of figures, yes. Connection with Modigliani they certainly knew each other. I don’t think they were close in the way that Modigliani and Soutine were. Dutcher, thank you. This is Tamara who’s reading Charles Dellheim’s book. It was Jewish Book Week. I’ve got it I think on my computer. If you can’t get it from Jewish Book Week, get my email from Lauren and I think I can probably send it to you from my computer. I love doing it. I thought he was a wonderful man. He was a very easy person to interview and that was I think one of the most enjoyable interviews I’ve ever done. I think he painted, yes, he was very prolific. So I think he did actually paint quite quickly. One of my rabbi moved to Holy Blossom Toronto and found an old quote for a ceiling fresco, which had been turned down. One Mark Chagall. Oh dear, I hope he did well out of that.

Q: Was Bella an artist in her own right? A: No, she wasn’t. Her family were, I think, did I mention they were jewellers? I don’t think she was an artist.

Q: Any paintings reflecting his transition from cubism to his style? A: I hope it came across in that period. He’s doing different- From one painting to the next he’s experimenting and there are elements of cubism that always stay with him right to the end. The fact that he feels free to disrupt space.

What were the goats, I dunno, tell me, what were the goats, I’d like to know. It’s probably in Jackie Walsh Schlager’s book, which is an absolute incredible. Yeah, my auntie on the, it’s a mystery to me. I mean my sister and I were saying it was a great family shame, she was a nurse. I mean, cause my family did, I have a German second name as you as you know and they had German ancestors, but I dunno why she was sent to- It’s a mystery. I think it was a kind of hysteria at the beginning of the war that she was apparently a very difficult woman and quarrelling with people all the time and somebody probably denounced her.

Q: Is the Moscow Mural on permanent display? A: I’m not sure about that. I hope it is. Presumably in Moscow. Not painted glass, it’s stained glass.

Where are we? I think I’ve jumped a lot. Yes, I have. I’m not sure that the angel represents Christianity. In Judaism there’s the instance of angels. Yes, but I think in that particular case, as it’s a painting about conception, I think there is a link with the enunciation. Let me see where I went. The bridal chairs telling story about life of an artist Marc Chagall through the eyes of his daughter Eda. Is that, I’m wondering, is that fiction or is that Eda? She of course had a very close relationship with him. Thank you for your- Soutine is a painter. I don’t know of a composer called Soutine. I’m going to love Soutine. He’s probably my favourite Jewish artist actually and I will be talking about him shortly. A lot of symbolism. It’s a very personal kind of symbolism. So, so not always, it’s not the kind of symbolism that you can find saying in renaissance work where you can say, this means this and this means this.

Q: Did he know Kandinsky? A: Kandinsky was in Munich and in Germany till 1933, he would’ve known of his work I think. It’s very likely that he would’ve heard about it when he was in Berlin. And they might have known the only time they could have known each other would’ve been after 1933, between 1933 and 1940 when Kandinsky was a refugee in France.

A new book on the Isle of Man. What a fascinating place that must have been. God, it was like an open university. It was actually an equivalent of Lockdown University, The Isle of Man during Second World War.

Q: Does he have contemporary descendants? A: I think he must have. He had, cause he had two children. He had a daughter and he had a son. But Vava made sure that he didn’t have much of a relationship with the son.

Yes, those windows in the Hadasa Hospital in Jerusalem. Very nice to have a nine foot high mural. I’d love to have a mosaic in my garden. Thank you for your very kind comments. Varian Fry saved many Jewish lives and not only Jewish lives, many intellectuals. He’s a great hero, Varian Fry. Art Institute of Chicago, wonderful museum. I don’t think his wife, I don’t think his last wife was Jewish. I’d need to check on that. He’s buried in France. Saint Paul de Vence and the goat. I’m sorry, I need to do some work on your behalf there and find out what the goat means. And this is Gita who met him. I don’t think he’s trying to, I think she’s expressing a wonderful feeling of liberation and ecstasy with those floating figures. Right.

Q: What happened to his daughter? A: Well, she survived him. I don’t know. She can’t still be alive. No, she’d be too old.

I don’t think, I would really, somebody, we invite somebody else to talk about the later work because I don’t feel it so much. I mean I really love the early work. I love all the Russian things. They’re fantastic. I like the Paris things, but reading list, yes, that reading it’s a list of all the names and all the titles and all the dates and it gets sent to you every lecture I do. The link you have to the lecture, that list, you need to scroll down and then you can find it.

Q: What was he would’ve known Brock? A: I don’t think he had a personal relationship with him.

This is, oh, a book by, with a preface by call Paul Lanceman. Nadine Nezoa . Yes. And that’s the subject I’m going to be talking about. It was a fantastic exhibition of the Jewish artists Ecole de Paris at the museum and there is a very, very good catalogue of that, which is still sometimes available. It’s easy to find online. They’re flying because Chagall often use the Yiddish proverb. That’s very convincing. Proverbs about dreamers. I think that kind of folkloric proverb thing is an important element. Yes, it’s where it has a window and the cathedral in Zurich. I don’t, I never believed those theories. Modigliani was astigmatic and that’s the reason for the- No, I don’t buy that at all. There’s that book The World Through Blunted Sight, I don’t go for those theories. Thank you. Will you include Samuel Beck. I don’t know, I don’t know it, I’m sorry to say. Right. His granddaughter lives in New York. Thank you Susan for telling us that.

He had a son with the second wife. Distant contact with Chagall when he was commissioned to produce a large tapestry. Yeah, my daughters-in-law’s mother wrote The Bridal Affair. Her name is Gloria Gold Wright. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Dora Horns book People Love Dead Jews. Wow, that is a title and a half, isn’t it? His granddaughter Bella has a flower shop in Manhattan. How nice, that’s very appropriate. Thank you. Ladders in Judaism associated with of course with Jacobs Ladder. Goat. Yes. Good thinking. I wonder if that’s it, you know, a scapegoat, symbol of atonement. Although that doesn’t seem to quite fit in with those rather naughty goats where he seems to be mocking Malevich. Scapegoat somebody else says. Yeah, very good. Thank you.

Right, I think that’s it. I’m off to Vienna tomorrow. I’m there. I’m going to meet up with several people from Lockdown I’ve never met before. Looking forward to that. And I’ll be back with you a week today when I’ll be talking to you from Paris. Thank you everybody. Bye-Bye.