Chagall

CHAGALL PS Chagall 4C ok.qxp 7/6/2007 5:35 PM Page 2 Text: Mikhaïl Guerman, Sylvie Forestier Layout: Baseline Co. Ltd. 127-129A Nguyen Hue Fiditourist Building, 3rd Floor District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. © Sirrocco, London, UK (English version) © Confidential Concepts, worldwide, USA © Marc Chagall, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, USA / ADAGP, Paris All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or adapted without the permission of the copyright holder, throughout the world. Unless otherwise specified, copyright on the works reproduced lies with the respective photographers. Despite intensive research, it has not always been possible to establish copyright ownership. Where this is the case, we would appreciate notification. ISBN: 978-1-78042-4 6 7-5 PS chagall ps Chagall english 4C ok.qxp p-37/6/2007 13 jun 07.qxp 5:35 PM 20/06/2007 Page 3 3:02 PM Page 3 Marc Chagall PS Chagall 4C ok.qxp 4 7/6/2007 5:35 PM Page 4 PS chagall ps Chagall english 4C ok.qxp p-37/6/2007 13 jun 07.qxp 5:35 PM 20/06/2007 Page 5 3:02 PM Page 5 M arc Chagall was born into a strict Jewish family for whom the ban on representations of the human figure had the weight of dogma. If one is unaware of the nature of traditional Jewish education one can hardly imagine the transgressive force, the fever of being which propelled the young Chagall when he flung himself on the journal Niva (Field) to copy from it a portrait of the composer Rubinstein. This education was based on the historic law of Divine Election and covered the religious side of life only. The transmission to the very core of the Jewish hearth was essentially effected through oral means. Each Jewish house is a place made holy by the liturgy of the word. The Chagall family belonged to the Hassidic tradition: we should emphasize here that this form of piety - Hassid means devout - gives preference to direct contact between the individual and God. The dialogue which is thus set up between the faithful and Yahweh exists without the mediation of rabbinical pomp and display. It is born directly from everyday ritual and is expressed in the exercise of personal liberty. Hassidism lies outside the scholarly Talmudic culture, the institutional commentary of the synagogue. It was historically found in rural Russian and Polish communities, communities based on the original fundamental nucleus of Jewish society which is, of course, the family. Chagall’s father, Zakhar, was a pickler at a herring merchant’s. Sensitive, secretive, taciturn, the figure of Zakhar seems to have had the tragic dimension inherent in the destiny of the Jewish people. “Everything in my father seemed to me to be enigma and sadness. An inaccessible image”, Chagall wrote in My Life. On the other hand, his mother, Feyga-Ita, the eldest daughter of a butcher from Liozno, radiated vital energy. The psychological antithesis of their characters can be seen in Chagall’s very first sketches and in his series of etchings produced for Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1923 which were intended to illustrate My Life. This antithesis, so strongly felt by Chagall, embodies the age-old experience of the whole of Jewish existence: his father and mother, in the artist’s paintings, in the very heart of the plastic space of the picture or drawing, bring into play not only the specific reality of a memory but also the two contradictory aspects which form Jewish genius and its history resignation to fate in the acceptance of the will of God, and creative energy bearing hope, in the unshakeable sense of Divine Election. 1. Kermis (Village Fair) (1908), Oil on canvas, 68 x 95 cm, Collection Wright Judington, Santa Barbara, California. 5 PS chagall ps Chagall english 4