Marc Chagall was an enormously popular 20th century painter, revered by the public for his rooftop fiddlers, biblical lore, upside down lovers and fanciful visions of Jewish shtetl life in the old Russian empire. Art historians and critics, however, have always had difficulty placing him among the many currents of modern art; to them, he often seemed unique, special, one of a kind. Some also found him repetitive and sentimental.
But Chagall was not always a loner. In an innovative exhibition, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has decided to concentrate on his younger years when, far from unique, he and a band of mainly East European, mainly Jewish artists honed their craft in Paris. The show, "Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle," closes July 10. Made up mostly of paintings from the Philadelphia museum's own collection, the show, which displays Chagall alongside his contemporaries, goes nowhere else. The museum has a large collection of Chagalls mainly through the legacy of Louis E. Stern, Chagall's American lawyer. "I wanted to give Chagall an edge," said Michael R. Taylor, the museum's curator of modern art. "He's usually seen alone. Here I put him with ... the others, and he's more interesting."
Chagall arrived in Paris in 1911 at age 24. He grew up in a poor Jewish family in Vitebsk in what is now Belarus but was then Russia and studied painting there and in St. Petersburg. Like many poor artists in Paris and a few writers, he soon rented a cheap apartment and studio in La Ruche (the Beehive) at No. 2 Passage Dantzig in the rundown slaughterhouse district near Montparnasse on the Left Bank.
With government blessing, La Ruche had been constructed by a French philanthropist in 1902 to accommodate the throngs of young artists drawn to the city that was now the world's center of art. The building's name came from its cylindrical shape: 16 sides three stories high with scores of small studios looking on the city through large windows.
The French artist Fernand Leger once lived there. But most residents were foreign and over the years included the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, the Lithuanian painter Chaim Soutine, the Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, and many other Jewish artists.
Unlike Modigliani and Soutine, Chagall was not noted as a habitual client of the bars of Montparnasse. He was engaged to a woman back home, Bella Rosenberg, and did not socialize as much as the others. But he did absorb their ideas on art.
One of Chagall's first paintings in 1911, "Half-Past Three (The Poet)," shows the influence of the fashionable movements in Paris at that time. The subject of the painting was supposed to be a Russian poet who lived at La Ruche and often stopped by Chagall's studio for coffee, but Taylor believes Chagall may have been painting himself as well. The figure of the poet is cubist with his head turned upside down, symbolizing, according to Taylor, "the head-spinning impact of his [Chagall's] encounter" with cubism. The colors also resemble those used by the French painter Robert Delaunay, who was well known to the artists of La Ruche because his wife, the painter Sonia Terk, was a Ukrainian friend of theirs.
The influence of Delaunay, who often depicted cubist impressions of the Eiffel Tower, is obvious in Chagall's 1913 masterpiece, "Paris Through the Window," which gives the exhibition its title. The painting is supposed to show a scene of Paris as seen through Chagall's window at La Ruche. It is a fanciful, delightful, explosive scene.
The Eiffel Tower is there, much closer and larger than it would have seemed from the window, and it is set against the bright and yet transparent blue, white and red colors of the French flag. A parachutist seeps downward, a well-dressed man and woman float horizontally and an upside-down train chugs ahead. A strange cat bays from the window sill. Within the room, Chagall puzzles us with a two-faced man. Taylor believes the man is Chagall looking eastward toward the traditions of Russia and westward toward the modern painters of Paris.
Chagall once said, "In La Ruche you died or came out famous." By 1914, he had achieved a measure of fame with a successful solo exhibition in a gallery in Berlin. World War I broke out that same year, trapping Chagall while he was visiting his family in Vitebsk. He spent the war years there, marrying Bella in 1915. From then on, he once said, he would never declare a painting or print finished unless she approved. When the Revolution of 1917 pulled Russia out of the war, the new Communist government named him commissar of art in Vitebsk.
During the Vitebsk interlude, Chagall began to introduce traditional Jewish themes into his symbolic, Modernist paintings. This would set him apart from his old friends. In 1923, Chagall — now with a wife and child — made his way back to them in Paris.
