BlogWhen The Russian Revolution blew up in 1917, Marc Chagall lived in Petrograd – that is how St. Petersburg was known at that time. He was 30 years old, an accomplished and a well known artist.
He was going through an extremely intense and important period in his personal and artistic life: World War I, his marriage and the birth of his daughter, his avant-garde People Art School that he founded in his home town, Vitebsk, his work at the Jewish Theater in Moscow, whose performances were surprisingly experimental and avant-garde, and, later, his work with orphaned children in the “Third International” colony near Moscow – “These children were the most unhappy of orphans… I loved them. They drew pictures. They flung themselves at paints like wild beasts at meat”, he wrote in his book “My Life”.
The Jewish Museum, New York, has recently presented the exhibition “Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk”. The exhibition came to New York from The Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, marking the 100th anniversary of Chagall’s appointment as Fine Arts Commissioner for the Vitebsk region and the opening of People Art School.
It all started in 1914, when Chagall came back home to Russia from Germany. It was supposed to be a short trip – to marry Bella Rosenfeld and go back to Berlin with her. Bella, an emancipated and well educated young woman, was from the family of a Vitebsk jeweler. Despite her family’s opposition – they considered Chagall too “bohemian” – Marc and Bella were engaged in 1910. While Chagall studied and worked in Paris and Berlin, Bella was waiting for him, attending an exclusive private school in Moscow and studying acting with a famous theater director, Konstantin Stanislavsky.
The Great War prevented the newlyweds from returning to Chagall’s studios and, instead of Berlin or Paris, Marc and Bella settled in St. Petersburg – restrictions for Jews to live in central Russian cities were lifted at that time.
Bella’s brother, Yakov Rosenfeld, a well-known economist, helped Chagall find a job in one of the war agencies, providing financial stability to the young family. Now it was time for the real – artistic – work. War, Love, Revolution, Family, Daughter – an exciting time of unlimited ideas. Chagall made a lot of art works during those golden years.
Many paintings and drawings he made meant many presentations at avant-garde exhibitions, such as Knave Of Diamonds in Moscow, many artists and poets to meet and befriend, and many discussions to have about art and life. With some, like a famous leftist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Chagall had a lot of conversations about the future of Art.
Chagall embraced the Bolshevik Revolution at once – as he wrote later, he was totally non-political, but it was the first time in his life when he became The Citizen – the citizen without limitations – and that made a difference.
But those times were very challenging. “Russia was covered with ice”, wrote Chagall, “Lenin turned her upside down the way I turn my pictures… The factories were stopping. The horizon opened. Space and emptiness.”
For a non-political person, Chagall had surprisingly many people in his circle who belonged to the Russian revolutionary or political elite. Some he met during his years in Paris and Berlin, others – in the artistic circles back in Russia. Among them was a very popular poet and one who was unquestionably supported by the Bolsheviks: Demian Bedniy, a close personal friend of Vladimir Lenin.
It was Demian Bedniy, who in 1922 used all his connections to help Chagall and his family leave for Berlin through Kaunas, Lithuania. Chagall felt at that time that his art was not truly appreciated in Soviet Russia, that the leftists in Russia considered his art too traditional, and traditionalists saw it as too avant-garde.
Another important person in Chagall’s life at that period was Anatoly Lunacharsky – a controversial figure on the Soviet political landscape. Lunacharsky became the Secretary of Culture and the Arts of the Bolsheviks Russia. He once, back in Paris, interviewed Chagall for a newspaper article and had great respect for Chagall as an artist and as a person.
Soon after October Revolution, Lunacharsky had an idea to organize the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, co-directed by Mayakovsky – for poetry, Chagall – for fine arts, and for theater – Vsevolod Meyerhold (with whom Chagall would work later at the State Jewish Theater in Moscow).
There was an exhibition ten years ago in The Jewish Museum – “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater”, that highlighted not only the unexpected experiments and non-traditional turns in theatrical Art in the first years after the October Revolution, but also the tragic fate of those involved in the Jewish Theater in Soviet Russia.
Neither Mayakovsky nor Meyerhold would survive the Soviet regime – one committed suicide, the other was arrested and executed during Stalin’s Great Purge.
The Ministry of Cultural Affairs never came to fruition and there were speculations that the reason was Bella’s objections. Bella wanted to go back to Vitebsk – to her parents – seeking some help with their small daughter. Lunacharsky agreed that Chagall’s family would move to Vitebsk, and appointed Marc Chagall as Commissar of the Fine Art of the Vitebsk District.
“So – Vitebsk again,” Chagall wrote in one of his letters to Pavel Attinger, “with a lot of wooden polls, pigs, and fences of all kind, but artistic talents were sleeping somewhere else.”
The first decision of the new Commissar was to open a tuition-free avant-garde art school in Vitebsk – The People’s Art School as he called it. Chagall invited Lazar (El) Lissitzky, whom he knew from the years in France and Germany, to work there. It was during the period when Lissitzky was very interested in Jewish folk traditions – a Jewish cultural renaissance flourished in Russia at that time.
Another teacher was Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, his first art teacher in Vitebsk.
The School was opened in 1918 and the first assignment for the students was to decorate the city for the first anniversary of October Revolution. Students were very enthusiastic to fully apply their very new knowledge in Art.
Chagall remembered that the Communist leaders of the city “…were not exactly happy with those decorations and could not stop asking questions “Why was the cow green? Why was the horse flying in the sky? Why? What did this have to do with Marx and Lenin?”
Lissitzky, in one of his trip to Moscow, met Kazimir Malevich and convinced him to relocate to Vitebsk to work at the School.
Malevich, who went through impressionism and cubism, now preached suprematism – an escape from the natural forms into a pure geometrical world – totally abstract art, in which his “White on white” was one of the symbols of suprematism. As it was described by Malevich: “Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion,… it wants to have nothing further to do with the objects, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without “things”.
Malevich joined the People Art School in 1919. Lissitzky was very much intrigued by Malevich’s ideas and actively helped further develop this most radical, new abstract art movement.
Chagall was very upset by Lissitzky’s abrupt switch of artistic interests. “I am betrayed”, he wrote, “Not a single friend. Another one also left me…”
The poetic humanism of Chagall was in complete contradiction to the abstract thinking of suprematism. Chagall later wrote that each element of an artistic work should be specifically chosen and placed, but neither formally constructed nor put there by surrealist automatism. “When I drew death on the street and a fiddler on the roof in 1908, or when I put the small cow in the head of a big one in ‘I and the village’, I did not put it there automatically. In Art everything should follow your blood stream and your whole nature, including unconsciousness.“
The clash of artistic approaches between Chagall and Malevich grew deeper every day. Their heated discussions about aesthetic differences and disagreements about creativity versus constructivism, no doubt, helped them crystallize their own visions. The artistic arguing, however, led to personal conflicts. In 1920 Chagall left (actually, ran away from) Vitebsk, when he readily accepted an invitation from Meyerhold’s Jewish Theater in Moscow.
It was a bitter, sad moment for Chagall when he left the Public Art School for which he had so many plans and hopes. “I would not be surprised if, after a long absence, my town effaced all traces of me and would no longer remember who, laying down his own brush, tormented himself, suffered and gave himself the trouble of implanting Art there, who dreamed of transforming the ordinary houses into museum and the ordinary habitants into creative people. And I understood then that no man is a prophet in his own country. I left for Moscow.”
Not long after Chagall found a way to leave Russia for Germany and France.
With each of his works Chagall was making a statement, both philosophical and personal. We would like to finish this story about the People Art School era in the life of Marc Chagall with his work – “Cubist Landscape” (1919).
In Chagall’s worlds his romantic view of Life is always visible through any cubist’s curtains.
