Chagall [antikvár]

Starting from tire first decade of the 20th century, the most interesting groups to take into consideration are those that were formed in Paris; it is due to them tliat the French revolutions in the field of plastic arts fuse with that extraordinary phenomenon that was called I'Ecole de Paris. Artists arrived from all over the world. It is this fact that must be borne in mind when examining the phenomenon of the French aesthetic revolutions of the turn of the century: these were not due to a few French artists whom fortune and youthful enthusiasm had chanced to bring together, but to young foreigners, all of them artists who were attracted by the brilliance and renown of Paris. This brilliance and renown must nevertheless have been very well concealed, for these youths were the only ones to know of them and, from the artistic point of view, the Paris of that time was a bourgeois, conventionalist metropolis like all the others And yet Picasso, Kupka, González, Marcoussis, Brancusi, Pascin, Reth, Gris, Modigliani, Severini, Survage, Lipschitz, Zadkine, Chagall, Kisling, Chirico, Foujita, Soutine, Pevsner came and settled in Paris . . . We still have to consider an independent who might very well be, with Matisse, one of the most outstanding colourists of the modern period, that is Marc Chagall. He is not an Expressionist in the orthodox sense of the word, but his emotive art admirably embodies the Dionysiac spirit, both imaginative and bewitching. Everything in him is poetry, love, emotion and fantasy. He bears within him the whole of reality, but he only avails himself thereof with his back turned to the world, in accordance with the whimsical inventions of his imagination and the unforeseeable needs of his palette. He arrived in Paris in 1910, with a greater wealth of memories of his ghetto at Vitebsk than of the time spent at the Academy in St. Petersburg. He borrows from Gauguin, the Fauves, the Cubists and Delaunay only what he needs to renew his palette and notion of space (Hommage ä Apollinaire, Waiden, Cendrars et Canudo, 1911 —1912). As for the rest, he joyfully shuts himself up — with all his tenderness and a nuance of irony á la Charlie Chaplin — in his little imaginary world of Rabbis, peasants, strolling players, cows, poultry, angels and little devils, of synagogues and farmyards. He reconstitutes a fairy-tale Russia, truer than reality, and he does so in unreal colours of unprecedented brilliance. The intensity of his palette, audacity of his deformations and unexpectedness of his compositions far outstrip the extraordinary exploits of the Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter groups (A la Russie . . ., 1911). JEAN CASSOU —EMILE LANGUI — NIKOLAUS PEVSNER In the history of 20th-century painting, it is Chagall who, more than any other, felt the need of poetry in painting and threw himself into the most dangerous adventures of the imaginary so as to give reality to the invisible. He succeeded in creating his own transcendency, a religion that is his alone and which links his earthly affections to world events. There can be no doubt that this manner of painting is original, rich and attractive not only on account of its forms and colours, but because it unites and synthesizes East and West with incredible grace. Let us dwell for a moment on the extraordinary nature of this art that is so alien to what we call classical art. To be sure, Chagall is not the first great painter to have taken this path.