Chagall's Paris at the Art Museum

There's no mistaking the work of Marc Chagall— he of the lovers flying through air, the trains that travel upside-down, the (literally) two-faced people and people with their heads on upside-down. "Paris Through the Window," a new show at the Art Museum, shows how this artist got to be that way.

In the years leading up the great cataclysm of the First World War, what we now know as modern art was being invented on the spot. A multitude of ideas, some short-lived (Orphism), others inspiring their own schools (Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism), were diffused through the atmosphere like so many heady scents. For the young artist from Eastern Europe, the effect must have been nothing short of intoxicating. Chagall was such an artist.

When you look at a fairly staid Chagall work like Self-Portrait in a White Collar, and juxtapose it with Paris Through the Window— one of the few works actually borrowed for this show— you would assume that the vaguely Cézanne-ish self-portrait predates the revolutionary landscape by a good many years. Yet the self-portrait was actually painted in 1914, one year after he did Paris Through the Window.


Reality flies out the window

Paris Through the Window is a work that can stand a good deal of study. Beneath a sky somewhat redolent of Delaunay's "orphic" paintings, we see a sketchily rendered cityscape dominated by an extremely simplified Eiffel Tower that resembles a church steeple. But in the bottom third of the canvas, any pretense of reality goes right through that Parisian window.

What are we to make of that train that traveling upside-down? Or that well-dressed couple reclining head-to-head and seemingly floating in mid-air?

Wait. It gets stranger. There is the cat with the human face; and inside the room, but not quite looking through the window, there's a man with two-faces and a small heart in the open palm of his hand. There's also a fellow in the upper portion of the painting whom I neglected to mention. He's descending to earth in an odd triangle-shaped parachute.

Do you attempt to translate this as you might attempt to translate a poem by Khlebnikov? Or do you just look at it and come away from it gratefully with a sense of joyous wonder?

Chagall's art is certainly wondrous. It can be joyously wondrous or wondrously sad. Wounded Soldier, a commentary on World War I, isn't a happy work.

Neither is The Crucifixion, painted in 1940 at a time of grim foreboding. Chagall's suffering Christ wears a prayer shawl.

In the Night— painted in 1943, and therefore one of the latest paintings on display— is a scene of lovers embracing, but the background is troubling, even threatening.

Chagall's Parisian beehive

The exhibition is only about 50% Chagall; the rest of the works are by the artists Chagall knew and admired, and was admired by, in Paris during the time that they now lovingly refer to as "The Banquet Years." These artists who worked with Chagall at La Ruche ("the beehive")— a sort of Parisian artists' colony— have since come to be called "The School of Paris."

The show also includes a fair amount of work by artists employed by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, including some wonderful work by Mikhail Larionov and Natalia Goncharova.

Since the show is largely drawn from the Art Museum's own extensive collections, it includes a certain number of wonderful "little" works temporarily paroled from art storage to see the light of day. I especially liked a small oil by the poet Max Jacob, depicting the poet Orpheus attacked by brigands— a topic no doubt near to Jacob's own heart.