Chagall, Twentysomething : Exhibition Presents Erratic Portrait of the Painter’s Turbulent Early Life

The decade between 1907 and 1917 was one of exceptional personal upheaval and startling artistic growth for the young Russian painter Marc Chagall. But looking at the exhibition that chronicles those convulsive and exciting years, newly opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, you’d hardly know it.

“Marc Chagall: 1907-1917” is a wan and enervated display, short on major pictures and erratic in the tale it means to tell. It’s too bad. Chagall is one of those artists whose critical reputation is widely thought to be overblown, and a considered look at his formative period is overdue.

Chagall’s career is today a cotton-candy blur. For that we probably have to thank the confectionary big-ticket commissions for the decoration of American culture palaces, like Lincoln Center, that marked his late career, not to mention the sentimental Broadway hit “Fiddler on the Roof.” (The LACMA show includes a well-known 1908 painting called “The Dead Man,” accompanied by a related pencil drawing and a lively 1911 gouache, that first shows the famous rooftop violinist.)

Conventional wisdom has it that “early Chagall is good, late Chagall is bad,” without much in the way of internal distinctions being made.

In 1907 Chagall had just turned 20 and decided to become an artist. The decision spoke of a profound sense of both personal alienation and cultural iconoclasm. Whether the young man knew it or not, that put him right in step with the burgeoning early 20th century avant-garde.

Vitebsk, the provincial White Russian backwater (northeast of Minsk) where he was born and raised, was very far from the European cultural capitals then so alive with the edgy promise of a new century--and the distance from Vitebsk was not measured just in terms of cross-country mileage. Chagall was intimately tied to the pastoral life of rural community in the Vitebsk shtetl, while he simultaneously longed for cosmopolitan refuge from its predictable and confining ways.

As a Hasidic Jew, he was also steeped in a mystical and anti-rationalist tradition that, eventually, would feed right into the Expressionist and Surrealist tracks of Modern art. But Chagall’s determination to paint figuratively flew in the face of established religious prohibitions, so common to Eastern European Jewry, that forbade representing God’s creations with images.

Add to this mix the passions of youthful love, and the story of Chagall in his 20s intensifies.

His father was an ordinary laborer in a herring warehouse, but the object of Marc’s ardent affection was the youngest daughter of a wealthy family of jewelers. Not until he had begun to achieve some notoriety and acceptance in international art circles did Bella Rosenfeld’s family relent and allow their marriage to proceed.

The exhibition sluggishly and sketchily follows Chagall’s sojourns, first to St. Petersburg (from 1907 to 1910), the closest-to-home cultural capital for Russian painters in search of sophisticated schooling, and then the big leap to Paris (from 1910 to 1914). Paris had long had cultural ties to St. Petersburg and had further jelled as the international center of the European avant-garde. A planned three-month visit home to Vitebsk in 1914 stretched into an enforced three-year stay, as World War I erupted.

The show is highlighted by the unexpected loan of the classic 1915 painting “The Birthday,” which shows a celebratory pair of floating lovers in a beautifully ornate interior; the picture almost never leaves its home at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Yet, with scarcely two dozen paintings, few of them major, it’s impossible to chronicle the maturing vision of Chagall’s art. Nor can the show offer any sense of this work’s significance, relative to other art of the period.

Among the drawings, watercolors and gouaches (more than 60 of them in all) will be found most of the captivating works in the show. Take a good, long look, for instance, at “Nude in Motion” (1913), a small vertical gouache on brown kraft paper in which Chagall employs Cubist faceting of forms to render a female nude in the ecstatic throes of self-induced erotic revelry. Endowing Cubism with an inner life of Expressionist verve was central to the artist’s program.

The LACMA show derives from an exhibition organized last year by the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern, Switzerland. (Many of the drawings come from the Basel collection of Marcus Diener.) About 200 works were included.

When the show traveled to New York’s Jewish Museum last spring, it was cut in half. The presentation at LACMA--a last-minute filler for the museum’s big fall show of contemporary illusionist art, which was abruptly canceled in June--has seen the show trimmed yet again, to about 75 works from the Swiss exhibition. To plug the gaps, as well as to try to raise the overall level of quality, LACMA curators Stephanie Barron and Carol S. Eliel have snared a number of additional loans.

These include “Over the Town” (1914/1918), a big double-portrait of Chagall and Bella dreamily floating through the air above a simple village, borrowed from Moscow’s State Tretyakov Gallery; “The Gray House” (1917), a foreboding image of a log house beneath an agitated sky, from the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection in Madrid; “The Praying Jew (The Rabbi of Vitebsk),” a 1923 autograph copy of a 1914 painting, lent by the Chicago Art Institute; and MOMA’s “The Birthday.”

These additions do help the exhibition, but not nearly enough. The show still feels like haphazard filler.

Given Chagall’s wide popularity, though, it will probably do considerable box office anyhow. Plainly the museum thinks so. Just beyond a display of etchings from a Bible designed by the artist between 1931 and 1956, the final gallery has been converted into a busy Chagall store, selling books, calendars, greeting cards and assorted Russian trinkets.

* “Marc Chagall: 1907-1917,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Jan. 5. Closed Mondays.