Emigre Artist Recognized by Homeland : Moscow Opens Major Chagall Exhibit

The first major Soviet exhibit of the work of Russian-born artist Marc Chagall opened in Moscow today, nearly a century after his birth and 65 years after he emigrated to the West.

More than 250 paintings, lithographs and sketches have been removed from the attics and storehouses of Soviet museums and flown in from private collections in France and the United States for the exhibit at the Pushkin Art Museum.

As many as 500,000 Soviets are expected to view the works by Chagall, who died in France in 1985 at the age of 98.

“Let us rejoice that he is back at home, or at least his works are home,” said Andrei Voznesensky, a prominent Soviet poet and one of the organizers of the exhibit.

“Today the purifying wind of glasnost is bringing us a full picture of the creative work of this man, who despite his long life abroad never thought of renouncing his homeland,” the Novosti press agency reported.

Glasnost, Russian for “openness,” is Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s campaign for freer artistic and political expression.

Chagall’s 82-year-old widow, Valentina, traveled from her home in St. Paul de Vence in southern France for the opening, bringing with her 50 of his paintings from her private collection.

Chagall, who was Jewish, was born in 1889 in Vitebsk in what is now Byelorussia. He was a recognized young artist when he emigrated in 1922, five years after the Bolshevik Revolution brought the communists to power. He drew his subject matter from Jewish life and folklore and rendered it in bright colors and fairy tale-like forms.

Chagall returned to the Soviet Union for an exhibition of his works in 1973, but the present exhibit at the Museum of Graphic Arts dwarfs the earlier one.

“This is a major occasion for us,” a Soviet journalist commented, referring to the Jewish community here. “We never expected to see such works by this great artist on Jewish life in the Soviet Union.”

The exhibit opens to the public on Thursday and will run through Oct. 11.