Marc Chagall

Paris Through the Window, 1913 by Marc Chagall

«Paris!»» Chagall wrote in his autobiography. «No word sounded sweeter to me!» By 1911, at age 24, he was there, thanks to a stipend of 40 rubles a month from a supportive member of the Duma, Russia’s elective assembly, who had taken a liking to the young artist.

After Marc Chagall moved to Paris from Russia in 1910, his paintings quickly came to reflect the latest avant-garde styles. In Paris Through the Window, Chagall’s debt to the Orphic Cubism of his colleague Robert Delaunay is clear in the semitransparent overlapping planes of vivid color in the sky above the city. The Eiffel Tower, which appears in the cityscape, was also a frequent subject in Delaunay’s work. For both artists it served as a metaphor for Paris and perhaps modernity itself. Chagall’s parachutist might also refer to contemporary experience, since the first successful jump occurred in 1912. Other motifs suggest the artist’s native Vitebsk. This painting is an enlarged version of a window view in a self-portrait painted one year earlier, in which the artist contrasted his birthplace with Paris.

The Janus figure in Paris Through the Window has been read as the artist looking at once westward to his new home in France and eastward to Russia. Chagall, however, refused literal interpretations of his paintings, and it is perhaps best to think of them as lyrical evocations, similar to the allusive plastic poetry of the artist’s friends Blaise Cendrars (who named this canvas) and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Years after Chagall painted The Soldier Drinks he stated that it developed from his memory of tsarist soldiers who were billeted with families during the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war. The enlisted man in the picture, with his right thumb pointing out the window and his left index finger pointing to the cup, is similar to the two-faced man in Paris Through the Window in that both figuratively mediate between dual worlds-interior versus exterior space, past and present, the imaginary and the real. In paintings such as these it is clear that the artist preferred the life of the mind, memory, and magical Symbolism over realistic representation.

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DailyArtMagazine.com – Art History Stories

Marc Chagall, Paris Through The Window

Painting of the Week

Marc Chagall, Paris Through The Window

Audrey Hepburn in the movie Sabrina said: “Paris is always a good idea”. A similar idea must have come to the mind of Marc Chagall who moved to Paris from Russia in 1910. Chagall was overwhelmed by the recent inventions of the various Avantgarde movements.

Marc Chagall, Paris through the Window, 1913, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift, © 2017 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

In Paris Through the Window, Chagall’s debt to the Orphic Cubism of his colleague Robert Delaunay is clear in the semitransparent overlapping planes of vivid color in the sky above the city. Delaunay also loved to painted The Eiffel Tower. Chagall’s parachutist might also refer to contemporary experience, since the first successful jump off the top of the Eiffel Tower occurred in 1911 and the fact that a Russian inventor was the creator the first workable knapsack parachute.

The 1911 test of a parachute in Paris.

It seems likely the artist also included this man, falling from the sky into Paris, as a reference to the leap of faith he has just taken with his new Western lifestyle and the new contemporary art forms he is now embracing. Other motifs suggest the artist’s native Vitebsk. This painting is an enlarged version of a window view in a self-portrait painted one year earlier, in which the artist contrasted his birthplace with Paris. The Janus (the Roman god with two faces) figure in Paris Through the Window has been read as the artist looking at once westward to his new home in France and eastward to Russia.

The famous artist’s nostalgia for his homeland Russia is also represented by the upside down railroad train to the left of the cat in the center of the painting. This represented his inability to return home. Please notice the human face of the yellow cat. The Jewish people often thought of cats as sinners who have passed on, but have returned to this life via the feline form to haunt family members.

The end result of the painting is a brilliantly balanced and visually appealing snapshot of Paris, juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, all seen through eyes that are both eccentric and loving.

His First Brush With the City of Light

By Karen Rosenberg

If you were an Eastern European artist in early-20th-century Paris, you were part of a close, intensely competitive network. Montparnasse was full of ramshackle studio buildings like La Ruche, or the beehive, a honeycomblike structure where the Russian-Jewish painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) struggled alongside Modigliani, Soutine and other expats. “In La Ruche, you died or came out famous,” Chagall is said to have remarked.

“Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, tries to recapture some of this proximal magic. The show sounds very much like a reprise of last year’s “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris” — the crucial difference being that Chagall was no Picasso.

Like the Picasso exhibition, “Paris Through the Window” builds on the Philadephia Museum’s substantial collection of early Modern art. It includes a taste of Chagall at his best, as well as a smattering of Modiglianis and Soutines and a generous serving of influential if less beloved artists like Jean Metzinger, Jacques Lipchitz and Albert Gleizes. But it feels uninspired, more like a festival obligation (it was planned in conjunction with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts) than like a flash of curatorial inspiration.

And it does nothing to dispute the commonly held notion that Chagall remained a small-town artist at heart, the proverbial fiddler on the roof, even when he was rubbing shoulders with the Parisian avant-garde.

The show, organized by the museum’s curator of Modern art, Michael Taylor, gets off to a promising start. Early paintings by Chagall and his Cubist associates show us that he had the potential to become a much more exciting artist. Under the influence of Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, among others, he introduced fractured forms to his enchanted scenes of city life.

In Chagall’s “Self-Portrait With White Collar,” which hangs next to Metzinger’s marvelous “Tea Time (Woman With a Teaspoon,)” a faceted forehead and deep under-eye hollows amount to a tentative stab at Cubism. So does the prismatic sky of “Paris Through the Window,” though the painting’s mythic creatures (among them a parachutist, a Janus figure and a cat with a human face) overshadow its formal achievements.

Here too is “Half-Past Three (The Poet)” (1911), a highlight of the museum’s collection and undoubtedly one of the best paintings Chagall ever made. It shows the Russian writer Mazin scribbling lines in a notebook and raising a coffee cup to his upside-down, green-tinged head. The painting’s broken diagonals hold Chagall’s sentimental tendencies in check, evoking the bleary-eyed sensations of the wee hours.

That upended head — a reference to a Yiddish idiom for madness or delirium, “fardreiter kop” — reappears in the later work “Oh God” (1919). Chagall painted it as he was being pushed out of the art school he had founded in his hometown, Vitebsk. He had quarreled with El Lissitsky and Kazimir Malevich, whose Constructivist curriculum had proved more popular with the students.

Chagall had been stuck in Russia since 1914, when he went home to visit family on the eve of World War I. In his small painting “The Smolensk Newspaper,” two seated men bearing a more than casual resemblance to Cézanne’s “Card Players” react to the news of war breaking out.

‘Paris Through the Window’

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It wasn’t all bad at home. Chagall found a wife, Bella Rosenfeld, who would appear in his well-known series of marriage portraits. (In the one that’s here, the mawkish “In the Night,” the couple is locked in an embrace on a snowy Vitebsk street.)

He also worked as a muralist, and as a costume and set designer in the Russian theater, using the connections of his old teacher, Leon Bakst, the principal artist of the Ballets Russes in Paris. The show devotes a rather large section to that dance company, with a paucity of Chagalls but an abundance of brilliantly folkloric studies by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

Chagall made it back to Paris in 1923, where some major commissions from the powerful dealer Ambroise Vollard kept him busy illustrating new editions of Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and La Fontaine’s “Fables.” Sadly those works aren’t on view, though a couple of prints made around the same time (to accompany Chagall’s autobiography, “My Life”) are.

A reunion was under way in Montparnasse, where the old gang from La Ruche had been anointed as the “School of Paris.” But Chagall remained in shtetl mode, to judge from a curious painting of a woman and a pig bent over the same trough.

Works like this one make you wonder why “Paris Through the Window” has nothing much to say about Chagall’s Surrealist legacy. His dreamlike imagery — all those flying cows and floating villagers — was admired by the poets André Breton, Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. Within the Philadelphia Museum’s online collection, a search for “Surrealism” turns up seven works by Chagall, in addition to Miró, Dalí and de Chirico.

It’s also possible to celebrate Chagall the illustrator, set designer and muralist without making him out to be an arch-Modernist. (The Jewish Museum’s “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,” in 2008-9, did just that.) But “Paris Through the Window” does the opposite, overplaying Chagall’s avant-garde credentials at the expense of his artful storytelling.