A Painter's Vignettes

...There is enough material to supply "ideas" for many short stories, novels, social and art criticisms...

...And Chagall's imagery ("That woman was like a cord of damp wood, covered with snow"), his content ("At the sight of her I suffered the pains of a pregnant woman...

...As a child, afraid to take his place in that world, he sought only some escape: "I'll be a singer, a cantor...

...Can he help it if only when he touches some aspect of art is there nothing passive or equivocal in his attitude...

...The panorama he presents moves swiftly, picturing the life of a Jewish child in the village Vitebsk, the making of a modern artist from scratch, the Jew in Russia, his education, his introductions to sex, his romance with his wife, Paris, and the first years of the Soviets...

...We must supply our own comprehension and groans...

...Yet which important movement has not had its poet-and-painter friendships and collaborations...

...Chagall rarely takes more than half a page or even a sentence to describe anything...

...Petersburg, he volunteers no opinion, no interpretation beyond the pictures he draws...

...Objects, people, emotions fly and float across every page...

...A dog actually bites him, then returns repeatedly as an image or in dreams...

...As they learn from each other...

...modesty bores me...

...What if each verbal image of the childhood scenes recalls to us its Chagall pictorial equivalent...

...Like his paintings, Chagall's writing is deceptively simple, thick with decoys for the eager analyst...

...his head floats off, Bella seems to float across his canvas, he flies and the train flies with him, a swarm of happiness bursts the planks and flies off into space...

...Today, the verbal sensibility of painter Robert Motherwell reflects his reading range and -bias as surely as the permissive rhetoric in the written statements of so many younger abstract artists testifies to their solidarity and association with the "Beat" writers...

...Despite its blurb, Chagall's book does not present a "warm, delightful picture" full of "happy fantasy" and "primitive joy...

...There is the constant use of the colors of his palette, especially blue: blue skies, blue air, blue souls—on and on...

...With ingenuous-seeming anecdotes of relatives, of anti-Semitism, of sex, of poets in Paris or early Soviet culture, he manages to mention every kindness he received—while insinuating into this "warm-hearted autobiography" every nasty jolt of his life, giving full-name credit to those who slighted or hurt him...

...He has chosen art for his revolution...

...Reviewed by May Natalie Tabak Author, "But Not For Love," "A Fish h Not a Pet" NO ART CRITIC or novelist wishing to communicate the particular quality of Chagall's work could do better than he himself has in these 174 pages of prose which resembles poetry—which, in turn, resembles his paintings...

...From beginning to end, Chagall presents the adult world with the pruned indifference of children, aware only of direct experience, minutely observed but accepted as given, without analysis, rebellion or even criticism...

...That Chagall does not fill his vignettes with highlights and shadings is clearly not because, as a painter, he finds words an awkward medium...

...Chagall wrote, "Can we help it if we see world events only through canvas and painting materials, thickening and quivering like noxious gases...

...Maybe this autobiography is no more authentic than memory itself...

...The result, however, is not a series of sketchy fragments...

...There is an increasing tendency among some American writers to assure each other, with peculiar self-satisfaction, that all painters are illiterate mutes, limited to the gesticulations of their art for the expression of what must be the artists' simple sensory experience of life...

...Tell that to my grandmother...

...All sorts of desires boiled up inside me, but she dreamed of a love that lasted forever") and his judgments ("And I thought: Down with naturalism, impressionalism and realistic cubism") have his painterly stamp, but the manner of his writing had to be influenced by the succession of poets (such as Bedney, Blok, Cendrars, Apollinaire) whose friendships marked his life...

...Only from this barricade can he speak with assurance: "Not modest, eh...

...Describing the coming of war...

...111 go to the conservatory . . . I'll be a violinist, I'll go...

...He takes childish pleasure in his rosy cheeks, in that he has become more important than those who formerly disdained him...

...He admits to interesting fears: "I was afraid of my majority, afraid of having, in my turn, all the signs of a man, even the beard...

...I'll be a dancer, I'll . . ." Whether he is describing the Soviet colony of orphans to whom he taught art, or his own ugly, though not unique, experiences as a passportless Jewish student in St...

...but to give a condensed version of his capsule histories here is impossible...

...In addition, the translation has a few flaws, but since most of us become familiar with reproductions of Chagall's paintings long before we are able to see the originals, perhaps some degree of verbal distortion through translation ought to be considered appropriate...

...Chagall is now 73 years old and as productive as ever...

...For a modern writer as for a modern painter...

...Despite the misleading title, this portion of his autobiography was completed 38 years ago in Moscow...

...does it really matter whether those in the book are the source of—or Chagall's recollections of—his own paintings...

...He says, surely expecting only fools to believe him, "It's all one to me if people are pleased and relieved to discover in those innocent adventures of my relatives the enigma of my pictures...

...How else could he have been so sure of all that it is possible—that it is essential—not to say...

...Indeed, each one continues to spin itself out as long as the reader's own multiplicity of perspective persists...