Magical Modernist

Sometimes it doesn't pay to be too popular. By the time of his death in 1985, at age 97, Marc Chagall was suburbia's favorite genius. He offered modernism without tears, without the headaches of Cubism or the thin air of abstraction. For middle-class Jews, he was also the chronicler of the world of their fathers, the poet of that lost, enchanted universe. By the mid-1960s, when Fiddler on the Roof took its title from one of Chagall's best-known motifs, his popular reputation was at its peak. But in the eyes of an art world that had always been a little unconvinced by him, he had become the middlebrow modernist, the go-to guy for shopworn lyricism, bathos and kitsch.

Can this reputation be saved? You bet it can. That is what shows like the voluptuous Chagall retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are for, to remind us that Chagall's best work is too powerful to be buried under the assembly-line charm of his later output. (And perhaps also to bring in the crowds.) Did he oversupply the world with purple cows? He did. But he was also a great and original artist, one who could produce work as deeply gratifying as any Bonnard, as inventive as any wriggle by Miro.

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Chagall's lifelong touchstone was Vitebsk, the Russian village where he was born in 1887. His parents were Yiddish-speaking Hasidim, descended from a culture suspicious of imagery but possessing a long tradition of mysticism and of the spiritual ecstasy that courses through his art. In My Life, the lovely but unreliable memoir that he wrote when he was just 35, Chagall recalls how his family used painted canvases to protect the wooden floors of their house. "My sisters," he observes dryly, "thought pictures were made expressly for that purpose."

Chagall had other purposes in mind. For him pictures were made so that lovers could fly and cows could hang upside down in the air, so that logic and gravity could give way to the golden disorder of fantasy. On those canvases he also made a peaceable kingdom in which men and beasts lived together in a mystical communion, an amalgamation of the human and the creaturely as strange and intimate as anything in Ovid.

In the 1920s the Surrealists attempted to claim him as a forebear. Chagall demurred. He wanted no part of the Surrealist notion that art flowed from the dictates of the unconscious. What Chagall believed was that art flowed from his whole self, from his memories and desires. Let the world fly apart under his brush; he was always the master of his own revels.

In particular the revels of romance. Next to Jewish life, his great topic was love, especially for Bella, the woman he married in 1915. In Lovers in the Red Sky, painted in 1950, six years after her death, a couple flies together through the air, as Chagall and Bella had done in so many of his other paintings. Those airborne pairs are his loveliest contribution to Western imagery, a secular version of Christianity's great floating figures, the Ascension of Christ and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary.

As a Jew in Christian Europe, Chagall was a natural-born alien. So it's no surprise that he was never comfortable within the confines of any of the European "isms." He arrived in Paris for the first time in 1910, when the avant-garde was still working under the spell of Cubism. Chagall took from it only what he could use, mostly the possibilities that Cubist fracturing offered as a way to lightly structure the space in which his figures moved. As for the more dedicated Cubists around him in the Paris art world, he wrote, "Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables!"

What genuinely excited him was the roaring palette of the Post-Impressionists, the way that Gauguin or Van Gogh pumped color to convey feeling, without regard to whether a green face had ever been green in reality. This turned the key in Chagall's mind. Whole floods of vermillion and cobalt and purple came forward. It was this discovery he had in mind when he wrote, "I brought my objects with me from Russia. Paris shed its light on them."

In 1914 Chagall returned to Russia for what he thought would be a brief visit, only to be trapped there for eight years by war and revolution. Named by the Soviets as arts commissar for Vitebsk, he headed for a time the People's School of Art, where the faculty included the avant-gardists Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Chagall's vision of a school that would encourage every tendency ran afoul of Malevich's exclusive faith in abstraction. In time Malevich and his followers seized the place in the name of Suprematism and its militant modernism.

Increasingly disillusioned by Soviet rule, Chagall left Russia in 1922. But before he did, he produced one of the high points of this show: a massive canvas that rarely leaves Moscow, Introduction to the Jewish Theatre. Created by Chagall to decorate that city's 90-seat State Jewish Chamber Theater, it was also a manifesto of his deliberately impure aesthetic, in which broad bands of color derived plainly from Suprematism are the backdrop but only the backdrop for resolutely nonabstract acrobats and livestock. In the lower right-hand corner, just above Chagall's signature, a man urinates directly into the eye of a pig. A parting shot at the Gentile Malevich? Some scholars think so.