Chagall, Artist of Joy and Suffering, Dies

Marc Chagall, whose paintings, etchings, lithographs and stained-glass windows depicted both the joy and the suffering of the human soul, collapsed and died Thursday at his home in the French Riviera village of St. Paul de Vence.

He was 97 and his creations spanned three-quarters of a century.

He wove, carved and drew them in his native Russia; in France, his adopted home, and, for a brief time, in the United States as a refugee from the Nazis during World War II. The body of his work was prodigious, and work was his reason for being.

“I’ve worked all my life,” he said from his home when he was 82. “I’m never without it. There’s love and work and your wife. Work isn’t to make money. You work to justify life. Those are small actions and simple truths.”

He was the last survivor of the belle epoque of contemporary art in pre-World War I Paris, in the company of Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and Braque. Half a century later he was still working, not only at painting, but in other mediums as well, distributing his artistic largess both ecumenically and internationally.

Chagall, who was Jewish, did the stained-glass windows for the cathedrals at Metz and at Reims, and in the late 1950s he began work on perhaps his most famous project, the 12 jewel-like windows, illustrating each of the tribes of Israel, for the synagogue at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center outside Jerusalem. The windows were dedicated in 1962.

He did the soaring murals on the ceiling of the Paris Opera House in 1964, and in 1966 he completed two more murals, “The Sources of Music” and “The Triumph of Music,” for the new home of the New York Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center.

His tapestries hang in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and he has a mosaic in the plaza of the First National Bank of Chicago. Somewhere in the storage vaults at the Tretiakov Museum in Moscow are the paintings Chagall did for the Jewish Theater in 1920, before he left Russia.

‘A State of Soul’

It was through painting that Chagall became an artist. In Russian his name, which his father had changed from the original Segal, means “march forward,” and that Chagall did to his own beat. He was neither Impressionist nor Cubist--though occasionally he borrowed their techniques--nor was he a Surrealist, whose work he influenced. Rather he relied on feelings as his primary resource.

“Personally I do not think a scientific bent is a good thing for art,” he said in his autobiography. “Impressionism and Cubism are foreign to me. Art seems to be above all a state of soul.

“A pictorial arrangement of images that obsess me” is how Chagall once assessed his work, and he got those images either from Vitebsk, his boyhood town in western Russia, or from such world events as the rise of Nazism, which inspired the massive “White Crucifixion” (1938), in which the persecutions under Hitler provide a Jewish martyrology swirling around a Christ figure. The image of Christ on the cross, as a symbol of the suffering of man, was a part of his artistic repertoire.

But mostly he dealt with fiddlers on the roof.

Happy in Love

Fiddlers, green cows, winged fish, donkeys in trees, flowers, vagabond clocks, circus acrobats and humans with the ability to soar over houses, these in happy, seemingly incongruous arrangement constituted much of the work by which Chagall is identified. Here was an artist with a sense of humor. And love was a recurrent theme. He was happy in love.

Chagall’s first wife, Bella, whom he married in 1915, was his lover, soul-mate, sometimes critic and model for some of his best works. They included the portraits “My Fiancee With Black Gloves” (1909) and “Bella With Carnation” (1925). There was also “Double Portrait With Wineglass” (1917), of the two of them, he sitting on her shoulder, an angel above blessing them. Their daughter, Ida, their only child, was then a year old.

Bella died in 1944, and in 1952 Chagall married again. His wife was Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a Russian-born milliner who had worked in London. She was believed to have been with him when he died and announced his death, the Associated Press reported. Before this marriage, Chagall had a liaison of several years with a British woman, Virginia Haggard McNeil, and they had a son, David.

According to some critics, his earliest work--when he was first drawn to Paris--was his best.

He was in Paris, soaking up its “light, color, freedom, the sun,” but he was not of it. His major themes were still of home. “It was from then on,” he said, “that I was at last able to express, in my work, some of the more elegiac or moonstruck joy that I had experienced in Russia too, the joy that once in a while expresses itself in a few of my childhood memories from Vitebsk.”

His painting had the character of fable in which memories merged and imagination took flight. There was movement as well, in form and in color. Chagall was a master of color--and of light. No less an expert than Pablo Picasso thought so.

“When Matisse dies,” said Picasso shortly before Matisse’s death in 1954, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” Although Picasso said he was “not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists,” he recognized that Chagall’s canvases were “really done, not thrown together. Some of the last things he’s done in Vence (his home) convince me that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has.”

In Paris between the world wars, the pithy formula of the day was that “Picasso is the triumph of intelligence, Chagall the glory of the heart.”

But he resented the terms “fantasy” and “symbolism” applied to his work. “Our whole inner world is reality--perhaps even more real than the apparent world.”

Chagall understood joy and sadness. “My canvases,” he said, “vibrate with sobs.”

Etchings for Bible

His more sober-sided artistic self began in earnest in the 1930s while doing etchings for the Bible--his “Abraham Weeping for Sarah” is one of his most poignant works--and he was caught up with events in Europe. Chagall and his family did not leave France until the spring of 1941, a year after the invasion, when it was almost too late, but he returned in 1948, three years after the end of World War II.

The tragic side of his work reached fruition in the works he did after Bella’s death, including “Around Her” (1945), in which Bella is weeping as she faces a circle containing a view of her native Russia.

In his later works, Chagall concentrated on etching and lithography, and some critics believe that he avoided sentimentality in these art forms.

“From my earliest youth, when I first began to use a pencil,” Chagall said, “I searched for something that could spread out like a great river. . . . When I held a lithographic stone or a copper plate, it seemed to me that I was touching a talisman . . . that I could put all my sorrows and my joys into them.”

The artist was born July 7, 1887, in a village outside Vitebsk near the Polish border, the oldest of nine children. His father worked pushing barrels in a herring warehouse; his mother ran the household as well as a small grocery, where she sold sugar, spices, flour and herring.

‘Heart Used to Twist’

His father used to be so tired that he fell asleep at the dinner table. “He lifted heavy barrels, and my heart used to twist like a Turkish bagel as I watched him lift those weights and stir the herring with his frozen hands,” Chagall recalled in his autobiography, “My Life,” written in Russia. “His huge boss would stand to one side like a stuffed animal. My father’s clothes sometimes shone with herring brine.”

There was in Marc Chagall a touch of the poet, which he also translated to his art.

He was raised Hasidic, an orthodox form of Judaism that stresses joy and mysticism. It also forbade, through a literal interpretation of the Ten Commandments, the making of graven images. “In our house,” he once recalled, “there wasn’t a single painting, not a single engraving on the walls of the rooms. At most we had a few photographs, memories of the family.”

By the time he was 13, however, Chagall had begun “to know the intoxication of drawing.” He had seen a classmate draw, and the process fascinated him. “For me this was a vision, an apocalypse in black and white.”

At school, one of the few subjects subject that fascinated him was geometry. When another of his schoolmates praised one of his drawings, he knew he had found his profession. So one day he confronted his mother, the real ruler of the household. “Mama . . . I want to be a painter.” As he remembered it, her reply was: “What? A painter? You’re crazy, you are. Let me put my bread in the oven.”

‘I Was Intoxicated’

But she came around and helped enroll him at the best art school in town, Penne’s School of Painting and Design. “Even as I climbed his stairs, I was intoxicated with the smell of paint and paintings,” Chagall recalled.

But he did not stay long at the school. He was out of synch with the teaching: Chagall was the only one who painted in violet. From there it was to St. Petersburg. It was 1907, and he was 20 when he left home for the first time.

Life in St. Petersburg (now Leningrad) was difficult. He lived in cramped quarters and at one point shared a bed with a laborer. He was briefly thrown into jail for lack of residence papers but finally won his first patron in Maxim Vinaver, a member of the Duma, the Russian parliament, a liberal who believed that all Russian citizens, including Jews, should be treated equally.

To earn his keep, Chagall also worked in a photographer’s studio. Without Vinaver, Chagall wrote, he might have remained a photographer. Vinaver subsidized the young artist so that he could go to Paris.

In 1909, meanwhile, he had returned to Vitebsk, where he met Bella Rosenfeld, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy jewelry merchant who had been educated in Moscow and dreamed of being an actress. For both of them, even though they met by chance at the home of her girlfriend--at the time his girlfriend--it was love at first sight.

He wanted to marry her, but her parents refused. In 1910, when he was 23, he went to Paris.

In St. Petersburg, Chagall had begun to come into his own as an artist. One of his best works was “Dead Man” (1908) featuring a scene from Vitebsk: a dead man on the street, a shrieking woman, a fiddler on the roof. In Paris his colors became more vivid, and he blossomed.

He found art in Paris “at every step, on every hand. They were the traders in the market, the waiters in the cafes, the concierges, the peasants, the workmen. About them played that amazing light that signifies liberty. . . . And that light entered the pictures of the great French masters effortlessly.”

There were masters old and new, and he felt “most at home” at the Louvre, where the Old Masters were like “friends long vanished. . . . Their canvases light my childish face.” He also was “astounded” by the landscapes and the figures of Cezanne, Monet, Seurat, Renoir, Van Gogh and the Fauvism (bold distortion of form and the use of pure, strong color) of Matisse. “They attracted me like a natural phenomenon.”

No ‘Square Pears’

Chagall was “discovered” by some of the leading poets of the city, Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, who dedicated poems to him and encouraged him in his work. He also did one of his most famous works, “Homage to Apollinaire” (1913), in which he experimented with the Cubist style. But basically he rejected this concept. As he wrote sarcastically in his autobiography, “Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables.”

As for himself, he said: “My art . . . is perhaps a wild art, a blazing quicksilver, a blue soul flashing on my canvases.”

Other key works of the period include his 1911 paintings, “I and the Village” and “To Russia, Asses and Others,” both lyrical, poetic works evoking home.

After four years in Paris, Chagall went home to Russia. Bella had written and indicated that there was another suitor. As soon as he arrived, however, the other man was forgotten. They courted for a year and were married July 25, 1915, in Vitebsk.

With the onset of the Russian Revolution, he became commissar of art for the city of Vitebsk and helped establish a school of art. Chagall was a poor administrator. He also did not paint in the concrete, realistic way the politicians wanted. “Above all,” he once said of that period, “don’t ask me why I painted blue or green and why a calf is visible in the cow’s belly, etc. Anyway, let Marx, if he’s so wise, come to life and explain it to you.”

In 1923, after writing his autobiography in Moscow, he returned to Paris. There he flourished both artistically and personally until the arrival of the Germans in 1940.

Extensive Travel

It was also during this period that Chagall expanded his art and his point of view. He did illustrations for Gogol’s novel “Dead Souls,” for the “Fables” of La Fontaine and for the Bible. In 1933, the year Hitler came to power, he painted “Solitude,” the saddened face of a Jew at prayer in the foreground, and the somber “Time Is a River Without Banks,” finished in 1939.

During the 1930s he traveled extensively, particularly to Palestine for his biblical works. In Holland he studied the works of Rembrandt and, visiting Poland for an exhibition, he began painting synagogues. He believed that they would disappear.

The outbreak of World War II caught Chagall at the peak of his career. He was 53 when the Nazis invaded France. The year before he had received the prestigious Carnegie Prize and already had had a retrospective at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland. That show effectively placed him among the 20th-Century masters.

He was forced to flee but never was really at home in wartime America. He had been sponsored by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which helped other contemporary artists move to this country. After seven years, he still had not learned to speak English. And in this country his beloved Bella died on Sept. 2, 1944, just after they heard of the liberation of Paris.

In France once more, he did restoration work in stained-glass windows, replacing those shattered by war. In stained glass he was acknowledged as the master. He also turned to ceramics and later to sculpture as a means of expression. And he broke ground with the intensity of his color lithographs.

Refused to Go Home

In 1973, when he was 86, he visited Russia for the first time in 50 years. But he refused to go home to Vitebsk. When asked why, he simply touched his heart. That same year a museum devoted exclusively to his work was opened in Nice, near his home.

In 1974 there was the consecration of the window in the apse of the Cathedral of Reims, burial place of France’s kings.

And in 1977, when he was 90, Chagall was awarded the Grand Medal of the Legion of Honor, the highest honor France can bestow.

He rarely appeared in public, but last July he surfaced at the dedication of a new museum in St. Paul de Vence devoted to his work.

In a 1958 speech at the University of Chicago, Chagall summed up his life and his art and his choice of painting as his means of self-expression: “It was more necessary for me than food. . . . It seemed to me like a window through which I could have taken flight toward another world. . . .

“As I grow older, I see more clearly and distinctly what is right and wrong in our way of life and how ridiculous is everything not achieved with one’s own blood and one’s own soul and everything not infused with love.”