His artistic talent took him from the plains between Lithuania and Russia all the way to the top of the contemporary art world in Paris, London and New York. He experienced a journey of intoxicating highs and profound lows: flashes of inspiration, praise from connoisseurs, fellow artists and the public, but all mixed with the heartbreak of Nazi tyranny, the destruction of European Jewry and the death of his beloved wife, Bella, while they were in temporary exile in America in the 1940s.But love of art and life came to his rescue, and this enduring love is on display at İstanbul's Pera Museum now through Jan. 24 in an exhibit of works from the collection of The Israel Museum, Jerusalem. The show is curated by Meira Perry-Lehmann, the Michael Bromberg senior curator of prints and drawings at The Israel Museum.
M. Özalp Birol, director of the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation and its Pera Museum, welcomed Perry-Lehman at a press preview of the show on Thursday, where they both unveiled the 160-piece dazzling collection of drawings, prints and paintings.
A long and eventful journey
“This naturalized French citizen lived nearly 98 years and in that period experienced humanity's darkest days,” said Birol. “The colorful paintings reflect his joy of life, but Chagall did not live in a bubble of happiness,” said Perry-Lehman. “His paintings were removed from European museums, he and Bella were rescued and taken to America and he saw the Jewish world he grew up in utterly destroyed.”
Chagall discovered his life's work early; a sudden revelation as a teenager when he saw someone drawing a picture and thought he must learn this magic. But how? Discriminatory laws deprived Jews of many civil rights, including the right to attend Russian universities. Chagall managed to make his way to St. Petersburg at the age of 19 and to enroll there in a prestigious art school. After two years of training in St. Petersburg he followed his teacher to Paris in 1910, where he found himself in the vibrant art scene that preceded World War I. The Cubists held sway in Paris just then, and Chagall drank in all the heady influences, met other artists drawn to the French flame and became friends with poets and painters.
His own work in this period drew on his memories of home, of Vitebsk. His longing for his hometown sweetheart pulled him back to Russia. The outbreak of war prevented his taking Bella back to Paris right away, but when he did return to the continent, he went first to Berlin, from whence he was lured back to Paris on a commission from the publisher Vollard. Together they decided that Chagall would illustrate a Russian classic from the previous century, “Dead Souls,” by Gogol.
Aside from wartime exile in New York, the artist would remain in Paris and the south of France for the rest of his life. “The earth that nourished the roots of my art was Vitebsk, but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water,” Chagall wrote in his autobiography. “I had no other reason for leaving my home.”
Most people associate Chagall with color, whether his huge murals or brilliant stained glass installations in synagogues and churches, but the Pera Museum show includes many illustrations he did for Gogol's novel, for “The Fables of La Fontaine” and also for the Bible. “He is known as a colorist, but actually was a master at translating color into black and white,” said Perry-Lehman.
Chagall began with the intent to do color illustrations, but the technical difficulties of the project made him revert to monochrome, wherein he learned that he could give the effect of certain colors by the method of lithographic biting employed. “Whenever I bent over the lithography stone … it was as though I was touching a talisman,” Chagall said of this part of his career. “It seemed as though I could pour all my sadness and joys into it.”
The Russian native also experienced discrimination in his adopted homeland of France. Nationalists protested against Vollard's commissioning a Russian to illustrate the French classic, “The Fables of La Fontaine.” But the two artists were of a similar temperament, for if the 17th century poet La Fontaine won fame for his sly rendering of the human character, Chagall also “depicted human follies with a sense of humor,” said Perry-Lehman.
You would think that the terrible time of German occupation would have burned intolerance out of the French soul, but nationalists again protested in 1963 when French Culture Minister André Malraux commissioned Chagall to paint the ceiling of the Paris Opera. The fantastic work silenced his critics and convinced everyone that the culture minister had chosen the right man.
For Chagall, hope overwhelmed despair, life and love outweighed death and loss and now, for the first time ever, Turks can share this great artist's vision in İstanbul.
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