Art Chronicle
An Interview with Marc Chagall
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NE
of the better known European painters whom the war and
Nazism have driven to refuge in the United States is Marc Chagall.
Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia, in 1887. In 1907 he took up paint–
ing. From Vitebsk he went to St. Petersburg to study there under Bakst.
I n 1910 he moved to Paris. Shortly before the outbreak of hostilities in
1914 he returned to Russia for a visit. He remained there until 1922
when he returned to Paris,-this time definitively, he hoped-only to be
forced out of France by the Nazis in 1941.
Perhaps the most striking characteristics of Chagall's work are the
persistence of certain images, apparently based on rural and religious
reminiscences of his childhood, and the anecdotal illogicality with which
they are arranged on his canvases. In his most recent work we still find
roosters, fiddling cows, floating brides, decapitated women carrying milk–
pails, rabbis clutching the Torah tight in their arms, and hall-clocks
slung from giant pickled herrings, very similar to those of his Vitebsk
period, twenty-five years ago. His earlier work seemed predominantly
idyllic in character. But since his arrival in this country he has painted
a large canvas, the
Revolution,
and a
Descent from the Cross
which have
stirred up questions regarding Chagall's point of view-his political,
aesthetic and religious ideologies-questions which, for the most part,
have hitherto gone unanswered by the artist himself due to his reluctance
to speak or to write about his work.
Chagall.-"A
painter should never come between the work of art
and the spectator. An intermediary may explain the artist's work with–
out any harm to it. But the artist's explanation of it can only limit it.
Better the understanding that grows from familiariy and the perspective
.,... that will come after the artist's death. After a,ll, it is better to judge a
painter by his pictures. His words, I am afraid, do nothing but veil the
vision."
Sweeney.-"But
your work is well known to the art-public in this
country. It has enjoyed an extremely wide appeal. You are regarded
as one of the leading fantas6c illustrators of the present century-a reac–
tionary from cubism and abstract art, a sympathizer with the emotional
emphases of German expressionism and a forerunner of surrealism in its
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