Marc Chagall- Icon of Modernism - Review

The reader turns the first page of this little book to see the 1929 oil on canvas painting, "Lovers" by Marc Chagall. The painting depicts a man and woman seated and embracing; the woman's head turned inward on the man's breast, while the man, an expression of calm and contentment, peers upward, watching a winged angel flying overhead, across a deep purple sky. The painting has the deep and rich signature colour of all Chagall's work, though lacks the intense emotional suffering and ambivalence that makes up so much of his oeuvre, however this painting evokes a mystical love, a true love which, in my opinion, expresses the relationship between the artist and his beautiful wife, Bella.

As part of the Jewish Encounter project, Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson is one contribution devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas. (One can find all these contributions here on Amazon.)

It can be observed that most of Chagall's work, according to the author, is an expression of his philosophy, his religious sensibility if you will, in the form of the "literalization of metaphors", deeply grounded in the mystical and symbolic Hasidic world and Yiddish folktales, which include in their writings the "repository of flying animals and miraculous events." (P. 13)

It is impossible to label Chagall's work as "Expressionism", but the representation of an acute imagination, coloured in fantasy, depicting highly charged religious symbols, including in several works, Christs Crucifixion in a variety of contexts. What I love about Chagall is the viewer is drawn into the work by its striking colour and busy subject matter and is compelled to study it, because the meaning of the painting must be discovered as it is not apparent on a superficial viewing.

Wilson does a wonderful job of narrating Chagall's life in terms of the major events that the artist experienced, spanning through the Russian revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Wilson suggests that in viewing Chagall's paintings against the backdrop of these major historical events will see the artist's work as a response to them, and his personal inner conflict between his "Jewishness" and his focus on Christ's Crucifixion, and also his attempt at secularism in many of his paintings.

My favourite paintings by the artist are his various representations of love that display an ethereal, mystical quality, a sublimeness that to me captures love in their most revealing forms, as Wilson comments,

"Chagall's vision of love, so appealing to the human soul, frequently involves a merging of two faces, or bodies, into one. In this regard he is Platonic, as his figures pursue their other halves in an apparent longing to become whole again. Over and again he paints the myth that Aristophanes recounts in The Symposium." (P.174)

Chagall's life Wilson suggests was an attempt through his art at the reconciliation between two worlds, a genuine effort universalizing or merging opposites, he writes,

"In his paintings, past and present, dream and reality, rabbi and clown, secular and observant, revolutionary and Jew, Jesus and Elijah...all commingle and merge in a world where history and geography but also the laws of physics and nature have been suspended." (P. 210)

Wilson's Marc Chagall is an erudite biography and insightful critical work. Although relatively short in length, manages to capture the artist who is considered along with Picasso and Matisse, one of the icons of Modernism.