He's asleep
He's awake.
Right away he's painting
He grabs a church and paints with the church
He grabs a cow and paints with the cow
With a sardine
With heads, hands, knives
He paints with an oxtail. . . .
Parisian Poet Blaise Cendrars was trying to describe Artist Marc Chagall. Hardly anyone else in 1911 thought him worth describing. Paris was just getting used to Les Fauves (see above), and bright young men from all over Europe and the U.S. were there, learning to paint in the new ways. But Chagall did not want to learn anything.
"Primitive art," explained Chagall, "already had a technical perfection toward which...
