Conqueror of Dreams

...Guided by it, one may even venture to select the pillars upon which his reputation will come to rest...

...In either, it is the nostalgia for the spirit that lifts a man with little training and a limited intellect into the realm of genius...

...He freely admits that his works are pictorial arrangements of the images which obsess him...

...In his gentle way, he has "forced" us to follow him into a land where such apparently contradictory states as dream and reality blend into a synthesis far above, and utterly different from, the materialist attitude of everyday life...

...As late as 1930 French critics assailed the dealer Vollard for having commissioned a Russian Jew to illustrate so Gallic, so classic, and so sacred a work as La Fontaine's Fables...

...But there are already thousands who perceive and appreciate la Chagallite, that unique quality the artist has preserved because he was able to protect from complete destruction his childish naivete and its concomitant, phantasy, even in the sophisticated salons of the great cities...

...granted also that the jolt administered by his often violent and brutal early productions has, in the course of years, been reduced to an almost imperceptible tingling, yet it cannot be denied that the marriage of French order and sophistication with Russian-Jewish fervor and directness has borne fruit in at least a few "poems in paint" unmatched for a sensuousness subtly toned down by refinement...

...But he cares little for those surrealists who claim their works are the spontaneous outpourings of the unconscious, and even less for those who, currying favor with fashion, cynically crowd their canvases with "Freudian" symbol...

...He is the editor of the Little Art Book series and...

...Is it important, is it really necessary to remember, in any discussion of Chagall's work, that the artist is a Jew...

...Yet in countries artistically more conservative, like England or the United States, the controversy continued as to whether Chagall was a Saint George who slew the dragon of unimaginative realism, or a calculating phony...

...There rather than in the fashionable color swirls of his middle and old age do we find that unstaged, unrehearsed poetic intermingling of dream and reality, that conversion of the static into the dynamic, that hegemony of completely free imagination over intellectual abstraction that links him, the humble ex-denizen of Vitebsk, with another man of pure and single-minded faith—that Fra Angelico of the early Renaissance, whose saints and angels might feel at home in the humble ghetto streets as Chagall envisaged them...

...However, the Museum of Modern Art show of the following years was surprisingly a big success, unmarred by any hostility on the part of the cognoscenti...

...Although he has not added any new techniques to art, nor manifested the amazing variety of a Picasso, his work has been a subject of heated controversy ever since his colorful canvases appeared to brighten the galleries of Europe...

...I suggest the oils of the 1908-1923 period, and the graphic work produced after his second arrival in Paris in 1923...

...When the late Samuel Putnam asked Chagall about the Jewish sources of his art, the latter replied: "If a painter is Jewish and paints life, how can he help having Jewish elements in his work...

...At seventy, the artist enjoys an unchallenged international fame...

...Whereas the prints are strong and shun a superficial pretti-ness, there is in circulation too much that seems to have been assembled according to formula...

...According to this conservative, the show rooms throbbed with "a general air of levi-tation and irresponsibility...

...In that year, Carl O. Schniewind of Chicago's Art Institute wrote that Chagall, "one of the greatest etchers of our day," was still "almost completely unknown to the print world...

...The pendulum will come to rest between the two extremes: those blind fans who avidly and uncritically snatch at every scribble of his pen, every dot of color from his workshop, and, at the opposite end, his denigrators who reject as sentimental and perfumed practically all that he has produced since his break with Russia in 1922...

...But if he is a good painter, there will be more than that...

...But in the universe created by Chagall sin, hatred, and discord do not exist...

...They like to fit an artist into a filing system, or to pin a label on him as though he were a dried flower or a dead insect...

...Maritain's summing-up of Chagall's work as "a divination of the spiritual in the perceptible world" most penetrating...

...He is even one of the few fortunates whose authority to make law in the realm of aesthetics has at last been acknowledged by the more astute critics...

...Moreover, and we cannot hold Chagall responsible for this phenomenon, salons and galleries are filled with forged Chagalls, recapitulating themes that he has been using for fifty years, yet without the stunning craftsmanship that makes even a coldly contrived, yet genuine, Chagall come close to true art...

...But Chagall has baffled critics since the day he arrived in Paris with a few "crazy" canvases...

...Today, only the prosaic seriously contest his gay disregard for Aristotelian logic, Newtonian gravity, or whatever rational and empirical laws he chooses to dismiss with the gesture of a king—and we are thus enriched by a fourth or fifth dimension...

...It might be an impossible task to correct the vision of critics like Craven and Knollys to see the poetry Chagall introduced into painting...

...for the spiritual joy of a Vitebsk Jew is fraught with the knowledge of man's frailty, and of death—the Jewish girl weeps under the bridal canopy, and the hasid is aware of his misery when he dances, and sighs when he sings...

...Not so in England where the Tate Gallery exhibition of 1948 moved a noted critic, Eardley Knollys, to write: "We are slapped in the face by a vortex of symbols, blaring out messages which may intrigue Freudian scientists and American women's clubs, but can give little pleasure to lovers of fine painting...

...he set up poetry...

...By 1946 the painter Chagall had won a complete victory over pedantry and bias, yet he was not sufficiently appreciated as the magnificent printmaker that he is...

...It is amusing, and perhaps a bit depressing, to see nations and groups fight for the privilege of owning an artist, but only after he has become a success the world over...

...Chauvinism is a dangerous thing...

...Oddly, the shrewdest comment on the "Jewishness" of Chagall was made by a Jewish convert to Catholicism, Raissa Maritain, wife of the philosopher...

...Nevertheless, to this day he has shaken off the obstinate attempts to fasten the label "surrealist" upon him...

...it speaks of mercy and joy, of fraternity and love...

...I mentioned Chagall's American debacle in 1926...

...His biographer, Lionello Venturi, described the artist's near-cubist period "as against mathematics and science...

...His own worst enemy, the aging Chagall has permitted inconsequential items —cliches without real spark—to be sold by mercenary dealers, although, rich man that he is, he could prevent fifth or sixth-rate work from reaching critical eyes...

...had he chosen to remain in America instead of returning to France after the war, he probably would have ended up in reference works as "American...

...Granted that the work of his first fifteen years as an artist has a refreshing roughness, a personal harshness that makes it unique in modern art...

...Alfred Werner, art critic and author, has written widely of art and artists for many American and European publications...

...Some even predict a longer life in the annals of art history for the Chagall prints than for his gouaches and oils...

...The artist, Schniewind reported, was watching "with understandable anxiety and concern" the vast amount of his so far unpublished graphic work...

...But Chagall's first New York show, in 1926, fell flat...

...I find Mrs...

...A forerunner of surrealism...

...Today, there is no longer reason for apprehension in this respect...

...France, after the initial hesitation, came around to recognizing Chagall's "right" to build his world out of apparently disparate elements, namely, the countless recollections, hopes, fears, and frustrations in his mind with a logic and in an order that is entirely the artist's own...

...is a lecturer at City College in New York__The Editors...

...At any rate, these two fascinating books are welcome because they show another Chagall than the one to be seen on the New York art market for a number of years...

...The Jewish element will be there, but his art will tend to approach the universal...

...It is true that the magic word "surreal" was coined by Guillaume Apollinaire after he had, for the first time, looked spellbound at Chagall's paintings...

...conceptions would be ridiculous, if they did not convey a little of the vagabond poetry and the pathos of his uprooted soul...

...I have seen in print, and heard in lectures, Chagall claimed ardently for Russian, French, Jewish art...

...In ordinarily broad-minded France, censors had branded one of his early pictures as pornographic...

...He could not help being influenced by the cubists...

...What is Chagall's position in the realm of modern art...

...As recently as 1945 Venturi predicted that many years would pass before the American public could appreciate the creative purity of Chagall's art...

...At first, most people laughed contemptuously when he decreed, pictorially: "Men need neither airplanes nor wings to fly over towns...

...In a book that appeared about a decade later, Thomas Craven, dean of conservative critics, gave him faint praise indeed: "His disorderly (sic...

...For in 1956 all his existing etchings (plus some new lithographs and drawings) to illustrate the Bible were made accessible through a large and beautiful volume (published here by Harcourt, Brace & Company...

...Art historians often deal roughly with individuals like Chagall who are difficult, or impossible, to classify...

...Though he may have seen, and still sees, the world with the half-frightened, half-amused eyes of a brilliant child, his hands are sometimes as nimble as those of Rembrandt...

...Still, the Jew has one great advantage—he is not burdened with the feeling of guilt to which the Christian doctrine condemns the souls of men: "One may say about Rouault that he is the painter of the original sin...

...It is also true that the veritable pope of surrealism, the poet Andre Breton, paid homage to Chagall by saying that with him "the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting...

...Would he be absorbed by cubism...

...She hails Chagall as a painter of joy, but of a joy different from the pleasurable feelings that inspire an unfettered gentile...

...But his own "version" of cubism, with easily recognizable subject matter, was not to the liking of the orthodox cubists who mercilessly whittled life and emotions to geometric patterns...

...SHELLEY'S proud assertion that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world might very well be applied to Marc Chagall, one of the most sensitive painter-poets among Twentieth Century artists...

...And Harry N. Abrams, New York, has issued an equally fine book, Marc Chagall: The Graphic Work, which includes etchings illustrating Chagall's Ma Vie, Gogol's Dead Souls, La Fontaine's Fables, and the Bible, as well as many lithographs produced in the last ten or twelve years...