The Violet Rooster (1966-1972)
In the history of world art, Chagall and Monet, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso and other names are equally deafening. So far, the largest traveling exhibition of Chagall's works in China has just concluded its journey in Shanghai and is about to land in Beijing, providing Chinese audiences with 154 authentic works to understand Chagall.
This is a popular master of art, his paintings seem to use sweetness to reconcile colors, with a wild imagination to present the world of dream and innocence. This is also an orphan who seems to be wandering in the art world, wandering away from any art genre such as Impressionism, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism, etc., and it is always difficult to be classified or defined. An important index to understanding such paintings is actually the human reality of the suffering that Chagall experienced.
Inspiration
In many of the paintings, a city with a green roofed church appears, which is his only and eternal Vitebsk
On a summer afternoon, the raging fire devoured everything like a beast, and it looked like it was approaching the outskirts of Vitebsk. Even more unfortunately, a newborn baby has not yet had time to cry before it has to face this sudden doom. Babies and frail mothers who had just undergone childbirth were lifted up together with their beds and hurried through house after house, tossing mothers and children to the other end of the relatively small town. Fortunately, a torrential rain in an instant saved the city and saved the fledgling child. On this day in July 1887, Mark Chagall seemed to have made a face-to-face with death and was born.
This fire, or during his childhood in Vitebsk, every fire That Chagall witnessed was deeply imprinted in his memories. Chagall said that he was born a dead baby until one day he climbed up to the roof and quietly looked at the flames and saw the whole of Vitebsk, where he was born for the second time. In many of his life's works, the symbol of fire, fiery flames, and red light became a permanent element, as if to hint at the source of his life.
Vitebsk, now part of Belarus, was, in the old days of the Tsar, a backcountry of Jews. In a sense, it was just a corner of a vast empire, a barren land, a place dedicated to dealing with Russian Jews. During the Russo-Japanese War, the Tsar captured Vitebsk Jews for military service, and Chagall remembered vividly how his young self had escaped military service and the brutal scenes that had always been there for a long time. Even in Russia, suffering seems to be the fate of the Jews, and it is also the fate of Vitebsk.
In this barren town, for ordinary people, life is undoubtedly a cold and difficult burden, and you have to hold it hard, piercing and sticky. The tribulations of life unfold unabashedly before the eyes of the young Chagall. "He carried the heavy vat, and when I saw him carrying those heavy burdens, when I saw him flipping the little herring with his frozen hands, my heart clenched very tightly... His fat boss stood by like a taxidermy," Chagall recalled his father. The painter's father had been a herring mate all his life, working day and night as a laborer, and the last car ran over him, ending his life. Exhausted parents, brother David, who died early, parents-in-law who were raided, old people who wept and prayed, and candles that surrounded the deceased, life seemed to be a tragedy that had already been written. Melancholy has become the innate background of Chagall, in most of the works, we rarely see the impressionist sky, fresh air, Chagall's sky is dark and chaotic, chaotic with the mortal dust of the world. Such is the case with Death (1908) and the Russian Village (1929) in this exhibition.
Death (1908)
However, in Chagall's view, this is not all bitter, even in his long and displaced and long life, if compared with many later experiences, everything associated with his hometown and family is so sweet, because only Vitebsk is the purest and most heart-touching life memory in his heart. All the sights of Vitebsk and the village of Leozno, the mother's house—the muddy roads, the green-domed synagogues, the old Jewish men walking with their burdens, the cows to be slaughtered, the rows of wooden huts looking down from the roof, and the light of the fire in Chagall's hundreds of works [such as To Russia, The Donkey and The Others" (1911), "Me and the Village" (1911), "The Cow and the Church" (1926-27), etc., Thus there is an assertion that is generally credible: the city with the green roofed church is Vitebsk. However, this is Chagall's Vitebsk, a dream town that is equal to reality, even more real than reality, and this is Chagall's only eternal Vitebsk.
Perhaps, the following passage can help us understand his deep love for this homeland. In 1973, after more than half a century of absence from Russia, Chagall returned to the Soviet Union to hold an exhibition, and surprisingly, he did not return to his hometown of Vitebsk, and in the face of questioning, he replied: "You must know that for the 86-year-old me, some memories cannot be alarmed, cannot be updated." I hadn't seen Vitebsk in more than 60 years, a huge time gap, coupled with the fact that the war with Hitler had almost completely destroyed the city and later rebuilt it. All those things I will see will be foreign to me, and the vivid sights that come into my paintings will become things that cease to exist, and they will disappear from the face of the earth. I saw that these would be unbearable pains, and it would only make me sick. ”
Russian Village (1929)
When the flying man and the fluttering head become an important symbol in the painting, he also gains a free painting mind
As a Jew, Chagall was not an easy task. Her mother painstakingly bought off teachers so that Chagall could attend school. His parents wanted him to be an accountant or a photographer, but he couldn't take any classes except geometry. In the darkness, Chagall always seemed to know exactly what he wanted, so he was always rejecting, even if life was so unsatisfactory, but he was unwilling to give up. After paying 5 rubles of tuition, her mother reluctantly agreed to let Chagall enter a studio in Vitebsk to study painting. The master of this place was Chagall's first mentor, Yuri Pan, a name that may be hard to find in the entire history of Western art, but his students, who were Chagall's contemporaries at the time, Osip Chatkin and El Lysitzki, are probably no strangers to us, and together with several artists of the Paris school who studied here, they later grew up to be important figures in the development of modern art in the 20th century. However, this was clearly not what Chagall wanted either, and he always couldn't stand the boring plaster like exercises and exams. At this time, the little Vitebsk could not satisfy the ambitions of the young man, and he tearfully picked up the 27 rubles that his father had thrown on the ground and left his hometown with mixed feelings.
After coming to St. Petersburg, the capital of Russia at that time, he stumbled and began his real artistic career. After his travels, he met the famous "Art World" group members Mskislav Dobzhinsky and Leon Baxter. The latter was the stage designer of the Gaguilev Russian Ballet, which was in full swing in Europe at the time. I don't know if it was because of his fellow Jewish nationality, Chagall was appreciated by Baxter and was hired to paris at public expense to assist in the work of the ballet, which laid the foundation for his later stage art creation.
Self-Portrait of Seven Fingers (1912)
Chagall never goes against the true emotions of human beings. In his memories, he is not afraid to describe his moments of inferiority and cowardice. Every time he meets the "person" he thinks he has in mind, he always panics, perhaps because of his family background, his origin, he is always so humble in the world, especially for an artist, it seems a little too much. Admittedly, the thin physique seemed to have inherently stripped him of his combative courage. This state of mind is indeed from the heart, not smooth or akane. This makes him always want to flee, to escape from military service, from predicament, from everything that goes against his heart, and even in the face of love he is so cowardly. On the fourth day of his first arrival in Paris, Chagall wanted to flee. In Paris, the Western European world's exclusion and contempt for Russian art, the denial of this Lower Riba people, came over. But on the other hand, he was as unable to listen to the teachings of the academic school, the practice of drawing plaster statues and Roman columns was always painful for him, and he did not agree with neoclassicism, impressionism, and cubism, which had prevailed at that time, because in his view, these schools failed to really depict the mind. Skipping class became routine, and he preferred to be baptized freely by the Louvre. After dropping out of school, Chagall finally settled down in LaRuche, the "hive" in Montparnasse. Anyone familiar with the art history of the early 20th century will certainly not be unfamiliar with this place, as Legger, Modigliani, and Chatkin were once settlers, and this young man from Russia entered the center of contemporary art in Paris. As everyone knows, this adjoining narrow room on the edge of the slaughterhouse has become the hot source of modern art in the 20th century.
Chagall gradually embarked on a path of self-guidance. In the painting To Russia, The Donkey and Others (1911) dedicated to the poet Sandal, although it is still a scene of life in Vitebsk, the milkmaid here floats for the first time, her head is separated from her body, flying in the dark sky, and since then, the flying person and the fluttering head have become one of the important symbols of Chagall's paintings. The peasant woman who fled the earth seems to have left behind the worldly toil, which may be the way chagall is free, and it is free to go to Paris, to reject dogmas, doctrines, and paintings that follow the heart, and at this moment he said excitedly: "Paris, you are my second Vitebsk."
To Russia, Donkeys and Others (1911)
Unlike Malevich,who was obsessed with building a perfect theoretical system, nor did he have the aristocratic pretentiousness of Kandinsky, he created for ordinary and sincere emotions
As the center of world art in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, how could her charm not affect Chagall's heart? Despite the Cubist frenzy, Chagall retorted indignantly: "Let them fill their stomachs with square pears on a triangular table!" Where are we going? What kind of era is this, singing the praises of technical art and enshrineing formalism? ...... Don't call me a fantasist. On the contrary, I am a realist, and I love the earth." Growing up, however, he was deeply influenced by paris, and we can sometimes glimpse the teachings from the Louvre in some works— imitations of Masaccio, Rembrandt, and Delacroix, and sometimes we can see the indisputable modernist imprint of The Fauvism in works such as Adam and Eve (1912) and Self-Portrait of Seven Fingers (1912), which are clearly Cubist and Offi style—the primitive and tense colors of Fauvism, the dismantling of Cubist forms. This is immediately reminiscent of Matisse, Léger, Picasso, Delaunay...
After Paris, a series of great changes such as the First World War and the October Revolution forced Chagall to leave the invisible mentor for a long time. The family after marriage and the birth of his daughter prompted him to assume the responsibility of head of the family. After the October Revolution, the Russian Jews were freed, and Chagall, who had "stayed abroad", was not only able to walk freely in Russia, but also found an official position in Moscow, and under the promotion of his old friend and politician Lunacharsky, he was ordered to become the head of the Vitebsk Art Commissar. In this way, Chagall returned to his hometown with full enthusiasm to work hard to build art. He did his best to dress up Vitebsk, establish the Vitebsk People's Art School, and at one point worked tirelessly to fund the construction of the Vitebsk Art Museum, saying: "I do not allow any rest, neither myself nor others." ”
Around Her (1945)
But at the same time, the natural artist began to recalcitrantly in his heart, and the administrative work kept him away from his easel for a long time, and he began to complain about such a lackluster life. To make matters worse, in order to build the art of Vitebsk, Chagall invited all kinds of excellent artists, hoping that anyone's art could be completely free to develop, but this naïve original intention eventually led to a vicious struggle between genres. The Vitebsk school was initially divided into two camps, one following Chagall's artistic ideas and the other being futurism led by Ponny. And at the end of 1919, Kazmir Malevich came to the Vitebsk People's Art School with his supremacism, and all voices became more and more inclined to this new art, which seemed to become the last straw that overwhelmed Chagall, like a silent revolution, and in just a few months almost all the students, teachers, and even Chagall's disciples were attracted to the supremeist imageless painting. Looking at this increasingly strange Vitebsk, the relatives have long passed away, everything has collapsed, and the following year Chagall once again followed his soul, chose to leave, and never returned.
Perhaps because of Chagall's reclusive life, he was spared the gunfire and chaos of World War II, and he seemed to have gained peace and eternity. Chagall's art after that was no longer swayed by the surroundings, and flew freely to the sky to which the heart was headed. Behind the indisputable indisputable may be the unshakable firmness and unswerving warmth of his soul, which makes his art maintain an inherent stability from beginning to end. After the death of his beloved wife Bella, Chagall wrote "Around Her" (1945) in grief, in which a white angel descended from the sky and brought a transparent crystal ball to Bella, which was particularly dazzling against a dim background, and the crystal ball contained the Vitebsk with the green roof of the church. In his later years, Bella, and his time with Bella, seemed to haunt Chagall more intensely, and the exhibition "Lovers on a Yellow Background" (1960) is his nostalgia for the spring-like love of his youth. Chagall was never as obsessed with building a perfect theoretical system to conquer the world as Malevich, nor was he as pretentious as Kandinsky, arrogantly putting on new clothes with musical notes on paintings. He creates for ordinary and sincere emotions, and painting is nothing more than a poem of the heart. Just as he would have begged God to make the Nazis' hooves come slower, he would have been wary of his fragile dreams stirred up, and he would have spent his life guarding the real world in this crystal ball without hustle and bustle.
Lovers on a Yellow Background (1960)
After World War II, Chagall settled in the south of France until his death, a steady stream of illustrations, stage art orders made him famous in the world, but in his later years he was still immersed in endless exploration, and learned mosaic art, when he transformed all the experience of painting on the shelf into stained glass on the Church of Reims, his art really soared in the air, brilliant and religious. When the great poet Guillaume Apollinaire first saw Chagall's painting in Paris, he muttered, "Surreal...". But we need to be alert that there is no suffix of "isms" at this moment. Chagall seems to be an orphan in the history of art, with scattered imagery, upside-down heads, floating people, magnificent coloring, all of which may belong to God, but by no means to any kind of ism, because for Chagall, when we give him a doctrine, it means to put a theoretical mask on him and beat him into the abyss of rigid form.
Bouquet of Roses
"Chagall" in Russian means "to cross" and "to step over". In his long life, he has crossed one land after another alone, stepped through one great change after another, and he always had a seemingly gentle force, a force supported by simple common feelings and the love and hate of the heart. He once said: "You have not seen the tears in my eyes, because, strange to say, I have always lived with my hometown spiritually, like a tree born in my hometown, it has been uprooted, I seem to be hanging in mid-air, but I have always lived and grown." ”
Author: Luo Jiayang
Editor: Wang Xiaoli
Planner: Fan Xin