'Chromatic Splendor'
Key, Donald
'Chromatic Splendor' Chagall: Watercolors and Gouaches, by Alfred Werner. Watson-Guptill. 87 pp. Illustrated. $17.50. Reviewed by Donald Key Tn his prelude to this book, art crit-ic Alfred...
...Forms often float in fantasy...
...In his introduction, Werner spends perhaps more space than necessary discussing the Jewish timber of Chagall's art...
...As a knowledgeable art critic, Werner realizes that artistic work which can be academically analyzed, pulled down, and stuffed in some cubbyhole cannot be great individual creativity...
...Werner provides such discussion with brief but informative notes about each painting as its reproduction appears...
...For Chagall will always speak to people who can set their imagination free and to those who, like him, need to dream...
...It shows in his work...
...They glow in pensive scenes, glitter with gaiety in others...
...Too many writers today, perhaps because of public insistence, strain and stretch to categorize or classify individual artists...
...Chagall is a Jewish painter...
...He admits the work of Chagall defies classification...
...Werner does not make this mistake...
...Ethnic qualities are far overshadowed by his universal expressions...
...This human quality which seems so rare today is indeed one of the constant contours in Chagall's art and is an element which, perhaps subconsciously as well as consciously, attracts viewers to his pictures...
...But this failing is corrected later...
...As Werner says, "Chagall is a born colorist...
...More space in the text could have been devoted to the two media represented and to Chagall's distinctive manner of handling them...
...He knows the subject well...
...The closest he comes to classifying is to say that Chagall is "a naive folk poet, an unashamedly sentimental, romantic, and tender man . . . They [the watercolors and gouaches in the book] are likely to find a receptive audience even in 1970...
...Reviewed by Donald Key Tn his prelude to this book, art crit-ic Alfred Werner links two words which most cogently and concisely describe the primary element in the art of Marc Chagall: "chromatic splendor...
...The book has pictorial and literal eloquence...
...Werner has written other books on Chagall...
...However, as might be expected in the painting of a master, it never distracts...
...It is particularly blended into his watercolors and gouaches which usually are smaller, more delicate, but no less bright in tone than his larger oils...
...Tenderness...
...From his earliest to his most recent pictures he used color in a highly original way for which there are few precedents, except in Byzantine art and Russian icons...
...The pictures which Werner has selected for this book are exemplary of the "spectrum palette" Chagall inherited from impressionists and such post impressionists as Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Soutine...
...Many are of lovers, always drawn and toned with innocence and honesty...
...This never can be said of Chagall, whether discussing his graphics, his oils, or his watercolors and gouaches...
Vol. 35 • July 1971 • No. 7
