Man of the air

JONATHAN WILSON opens his biography of Marc Chagall with lines from a poem by T. Carmi: “She loved Chagall / and wasn’t ashamed of that.” Thus does he confront the problem that attaches to Chagall’s work: It is too pretty and popular for some critics (“the stuff of chocolate box or pop love”). Wilson votes with the greater number of us who unabashedly love Chagall when he describes the poster of “Double Portrait With Wineglass” that hung on his wall when he was a university student: “The airborne figures, a young man and woman floating above a Russian town, the woman with a sexy slit in her low-cut white dress (possibly a bridal gown), the young man in a bright red jacket with his head tipsily displaced to one side of his body and grinning like Harpo Marx, embodied for me precisely the kind of secular, whimsical, neoromantic sensibility that, at eighteen, I found so compelling.”

That “at eighteen,” of course, strikes a cautionary note. Yet Wilson’s admiration for Chagall has only deepened over the years. “Chagall’s oeuvre, when seen in its entirety,” he writes, “seems altogether more historical, more political, harder and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe.”

The hit musical “Fiddler on the Roof” did Chagall no favors in adopting one of the artist’s iconic images, an episode that Wilson considers in some detail and that deserves a book in itself. The plight of the Jews of Russia and Eastern Europe and their struggle to escape violent anti-Semitic oppression were deeply sentimentalized in “Fiddler.” For those who believe Chagall guilty of the same sin, Wilson offers a spirited defense. “[T]he Holocaust takes place on the streets where Chagall grew up, and Jesus, frequently wearing a tallith (prayer shawl) around his waist, is repeatedly crucified there,” he writes of the world Chagall depicted. “[H]e walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.”

Wilson follows Chagall around the world -- Paris, Moscow, Berlin, Jerusalem and New York, among other places. No matter how far he traveled from his birthplace of Vitebsk in Belorussia, however, Chagall remained a flesh-and-blood Jew of the kind depicted in “Fiddler.” He was born Moishe, not Marc, and he was “never really altogether comfortable in any language other than Yiddish.” The Jewish outskirts of Vitebsk provided him with his “lifelong obsessive subject,” and he “sneaked Yiddish culture into twentieth-century painting through the back door.” In comparing Picasso to Chagall, Wilson writes that the former “was, if you like, the bull of the corrida to Chagall’s shtetl cow.”

The best moments in Wilson’s book are those in which he deconstructs the artist’s work and decodes its iconography. He suggests, for example, that there is nothing magical, or even whimsical, about Chagall’s rooftop violinists. “It was not at all uncommon for shtetl and town residents alike to take to their rooftops, sometimes out of fear and sometimes for fun,” he argues. “Chagall’s grandfather, for example, liked to climb up on high to chew a few carrots and watch the world go by.”

At a still deeper level, Wilson finds in a common Yiddish idiom an explanation for the floating figures that appear in many of Chagall’s paintings. “Paradoxically, his work is frequently a literalization of metaphors,” he explains. “The word luftmensch, which denotes in Yiddish an individual overly involved in intellectual pursuits, literally means ‘man of the air,’ a prompt for Chagall to set him flying.”

The purely biographical material is lively and even surprising. Wilson points out that Chagall, in his late teens, “rouged his lips and cheeks and wore eyeshadow” and wonders if “homoerotic desire” was at play in some of his friendships. He notices some odd moments in Chagall’s life. The young artist once sought an audience with the Lubavitcher Rebbe, spiritual leader of the strictly observant Chabad movement in Hasidic Judaism -- yet his “highly erotic and suggestive” painting “The Ass and the Woman” was removed from his first Paris salon because the judges deemed it pornographic.

Much later, in 1937, three of his canvases were included in the notorious Nazi display of “degenerate art.” Indeed, in 1941, Chagall narrowly escaped deportation to Auschwitz when Vichy France obliged its Nazi masters by rounding up everyone who “seemed likely to be Jewish.” What saved him was the intervention of Varian Fry, emissary of America’s Emergency Rescue Committee, who threatened to embarrass the government by calling the New York Times.

But the highest and best use of Wilson’s biography is as a portal into the art itself. Readers will find, as I did, that each of Chagall’s familiar images takes on new and often intriguing meanings in the light of Wilson’s penetrating work. *