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| Marc Chagall, At the Easel (My LiFe, Orion Press, 1960) |
I’m currently reading “My Life” by Marc Chagall. It is in Russian, and I haven’t read it before. I love his paintings, but his “portrait of a young man” is as valuable as Joyce’s own story. Born into a Jewish family in Vitebsk (now Belarus) in 1887, Chagall had to overcome many an obstacle. He was poor; he wanted to be a painter; as if this was not enough, he was a Jew and thus had to receive a special citizenship card from the Tsarist government. Yet he relentlessly pursued his Path, and eventually it brought him recognition and worldwide fame.
The passage I’m quoting rings true to this day, in my opinion, although it refers to Russian art at the turn of 19-20th c. And even though there are nowadays Russian artists (in the broad sense of the word) who successfully cross the line and join the European, if not global, movement, they are still – largely – a minority. From my own publications of prose and poetry and reactions to these, I can see that people rarely engage their imagination, vision – which are the key factors in everything I write. I firmly believe that the best work unites logic and emotion, reason and feeling, while, if speaking of method, I agree with Picasso who said that it was easy to paint like a classic painter but he was trying to learn to paint like a child. Your work has to be spontaneous, the reader isn’t interested in the hard graft you put into it anyway. But one has to work very hard to reach this level.
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Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from returning to it immediately or at least after a week, or a month.
I even wanted to invent some sort of holiday as an excuse to go home.
The Louvre put an end to all those hesitations. When I made the tour of the Veronese room and the rooms in which Manet, Delacroix, Courbet are hung, I wanted nothing more.
In my imagination Russia appeared like a paper balloon suspended from a parachute. The flattened pear of the balloon hung, cooled off, and slowly collapsed in the course of the years.
That’s how Russian art appeared to me, or something like it.
Indeed, every time I happened to think of Russian art or to speak of it, I experienced the same troubled and confused emotions, full of bitterness and resentment.
It was as though Russian art had been inevitably doomed to follow along in the wake of the West.
If Russian painters were doomed to be pupils of the West, they were, I thought, rather faithless pupils, and by their very nature. The best Russian realist shocks the realism of Courbet.
The most genuine Russian impressionism leaves one perplexed when you compare it with Monet and Pissarro.
Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why I could not ally myself with Russia and Russian art. Why my very speech is foreign to them.
Why they do not trust me. Why artists’ circles ignored me.
Why, in Russia, I am only the fifth wheel.
And why everything I do seems eccentric to them and everything they do seems superfluous to me. But why?
I cannot talk about it any more.
I love Russia.
Marc Chagall, My Life (translated by Elisabeth Abbott, 1960).
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