→ Chagall: Magical Gravity

October 19, 2018 – January 12, 2019

Marc Chagall was an eclectic and genial experimenter. In his seven decades of creative activity, this master ably expressed himself through every media available at the time: from painting, engraving, pottery and drawing to stained glass, mosaic, monumental sculpture and even stage production. Chagall created a universe in which human figures, animals and scenery drawn from Jewish tradition, live side by side with Biblical and religious references.

It is a fact that Chagall expressed his inner world through painting and colour, but it’s also true that engraving was very close to the Russian master’s heart. His plates are forests of signs, thick with Chagall’s tormented incisions often resembling the work of Rembrandt and Goya.

His etchings and lithographs are striking, in that they demonstrate his playful ability to balance different tonal values; they showcase his extraordinary skill in mixing whites and blacks, as well as revealing his unmistakable touch; delicate and distinctive in its own peculiar, intimate “gestures”.

Chagall was introduced to printmaking in Berlin in 1922, at the age of thirty-five. After his return from Russia, he first tried his hand at etching, found in the prints he executed for his autobiography, ‘My Life’ (Berlin, 1922-23). Moving to Paris, Chagall was approached by Ambroise Vollard, who asked him to produce a set of etchings for a deluxe “livre de peintre” like the work Vollard had already commissioned from Bonnard and Rouault. Chagall rejected Vollard’s choice of texts and instead suggested novelist Nikolai Gogol’s ‘Dead Souls’. The result is one of the masterpieces of modern art.

Jean Adehmar’s brief summary in his Twentieth Century Graphics gives us some insight into the work featured here: “the numerous figures in profile show astonishing types; the Expressionist influence is very noticeable and the Russian atmosphere is admirably rendered. The characterizations of the people Chagall presents us are so striking that we instantly recognize them not simply as portraits of individuals but as representatives of the human comedy that so much of Chagall’s art illustrates for us. Nor is this effect diminished upon further viewing; rather it is strengthened the more familiarity we gain with the images.”

As Franz Meyer has observed in Marc Chagall: His Graphic Work, the etchings paint a much larger mental canvas than mere individual types, showing Chagall’s “native Russia with its wind-swept vastness and, for all its bitter misery born of unreason and inertia . . . its inexhaustible, wholesome, joyous vitality as well.” While there is satire and mockery in these plates, there is also acceptance and even love of the whole of human experience.

Franz Meyer continues, “This entire world of stupidity, malice, and selfishness is rendered transparent through humour. . . . The basic incongruence of reality and appearance is so pointedly brought into relief that magnificently comical figures result. But this comedy is not a hostile satire or a pitiless record of these characters, with their weaknesses and their baseness. It is a liberating force which discloses the deep stream of exuberant life behind all the figures in the novel.”

In 1927, Chagall began working on another project for Vollard, a series of etchings illustrating ‘The Fables’ of the 17^th century French poet and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. In these plates, we move from the fantastic Russia of Chagall’s imagination and memory to the more dream-like world of ancient myth and fable, told and retold, changing from time to time and place to place, but ultimately, remaining the same. ‘The Fables’ aptly illustrates the grand themes of life that interested Chagall in many of his other works, especially the ‘Bible’: love, death and human folly.

Technically these works differ greatly from those of the ‘Dead Souls’. As Meyer comments, “Compared with the last sheets for ‘Dead Souls’, in the new plates the painterly content appears enormously increased. Chagall now foregoes the application of aquatint and use of the rocking tool; also dry point technique is scarcely evident. Instead, he does everything by means of etching, and covers the engraved surface with stopping out varnish, a combination that makes for intensive painterly effects. The etching needle draws the most delicately ramified foliage and bush patterns, the texture of plumage and soft fur, and through shadings and cross-hatchings gives a range of tonalities . . . from white to a deep black. . . . Thus each picture is the result of a long series of working stages in the course of which the pictorial design in light and dark is slowly worked out in a process comparable to the building up of the colour structure in a painting.”

Produced at the age of 88, Chagall’s ‘The Tempest’ features fifty illustrations reflecting his interpretation of William Shakespeare’s magical play. This series draws on a number of themes including the relationship between Shakespeare’s aristocratic Renaissance characters in ‘The Tempest’ and Chagall’s own imaginary mythological world.

According to the recent interpretations, Chagall saw Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ as symbolic of the stormy chaos which engulfed his own life along with the traumatic experiences of European Jews in the first half of the twentieth century. Chagall knew the pain of being a refugee, having recognised that his future lay outside Russia. It would be perfectly understandable if Chagall compared himself to the exiled sorcerer, Prospero, from Shakespeare’s renowned play.

Towards the end of ‘The Tempest’, Prospero famously gives up his ‘rough magic’ and drowns his book. Many have read Prospero’s abdication of illusion as symbolic of Shakespeare’s own farewell to the writing craft, since ‘The Tempest’ is recognised as the last complete play the English Bard wrote. Chagall’s illustrations are complex and multi-dimensional and can be interpreted as the artists own ‘farewell’ to the frenetic output he had accomplished on projects of this scale.

This exhibition also displays an additional thirteen colour lithographs as a synthesis of Chagall’s universe of colours and themes.