ART CHRONICLE
91
and figures of a Van Gogh, born in Holland,-in the almost Arab
ornamentation of a Picasso, born in Spain,---or in the quattrocento
linear feeling of a Modigliani. born in Italy. This is the manner in
which I hope I have preserved the influences of my childhood, not mere–
ly in subject matter."
Sweeney.-"!
know you have frequently stated 'art is international,
but the artist ought to be national.' Nevertheless, on your return from
Russia in 1922 after an eight years' sojourn there you came to the realiza–
tion that your native land-the Soviet no more than Imperial Russia–
had no need of you. You stated 'To ·them I am incomprehensible, a
foreigner.' Does this mean that you regard racism as more important
than nationalism and that you, as a Jew, were a foreigner even in
Vitebsk?"
Chagall.-"Race?
Not at all. As a native of Vitebsk I was still as
close to Russia and to the soil as the day I left. But as an artist I felt
myself just as much a stranger to the official, aesthetic ideology of the '
new government as I had been to the provincial art ideals of the Russia
I left in 1910. At that time I decided I needed Paris. The root-soil of
my art was Vitebsk, but like a tree, my art needed Paris like water,
otherwise it would wither and die. Russia had
t~o
native traditions of
art, the popular and the religious. I wanted an art of the soil, not one
uniquely of the head. I had the good luck to spring from the people.
But popular art-which I always love for that matter-did not satisfy
me. It is too exclusive. It excludes the refinements of civilization. I have
always had a pronounced taste for refined expression, for culture. The
refined art of my native land was a religious art, I saw the quality of
a few great productions of the ikon tradition-Rublev's work, for exam–
ple. But this was fundamentally a religious art and I am not, and never"'
have been, religious. Moreover, I felt religion meant little in the world
that I knew, even as it seems to mean little today. For me Christ was
a great poet, the teaching of whose poetry has been forgotten by the
modern world. To achieve the combination of refined expression with an
art of the earth, I felt I had to seek the vitalizing waters of Paris.
"I would like to say that my moves from country to country have
always been dictated by artistic considerations. Son of a laborer, I had
organically no other grounds for leaving my native land, to which I
think in spite of everything I have remained loyal in my art. As painter
and man of the people-and the people I consider the class of society .._.....
most sensitively responsive-! felt that plastic refinement of the highest
order existed only in France. Here is perhaps the source of my dualism
and my climatic maladjustments through all these years. Still I would
not say that I have been less able to acclimatize myself in Paris than
other foreign artists.
"Neither Vitebsk nor St. Petersburg offered me what I felt I needed
as
a young painter setting out on his career in 1910. Similarly, after an
eight-year sojourn in Russia between 1914 and 1922, I found the ideology
