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In the azure light that angles steeply down the slopes above the French Riviera, a sparkling translucence seizes nature. Rocks seem sodden with gold, flowers bloom like dabs on a palette, even grass glistens greener. This light takes hold of a man too. For Painter Marc Chagall, it is a daily baptism in color, an immersion in what is natural, uncontrived, and miraculously innocent.
Constitutionals have been a part of Chagall's routine all his life. The country pleases him more than the city; and since 1950, he has lived in rustic Vence, an ancient town of Roman origins perched in the Maritime Alps. Each day, he sorties from the garden of his white-walled studio house, Les Collines (The Hills), past the orange trees whose fruits lie rotting on the ground, along lines of spear-like cypresses and sun-baked terraces exploding with olive trees, down to Avenue Henri Matisse, then cuts off to rocky, flower-lined paths unknown to tourists. After an hour, he re-emerges, sweat pearling on his pale forehead, but refreshed and ready for work.
Love Life Joyfully. For Chagall, to sniff the humid scent of fruit, hear the cicadas crackling in the bushes, and feel the feverish sun is a necessary daily act of spiritual rebirth. Not that he attempts to imitate nature; rather, he aims to continue it into the realm of the mind. "In the abstract," he says, "one imitates but does not continue nature. Great art picks up where nature ends." And for him, there is neither world enough nor time to transmute all that he sees, breathes and dreams. "I have no vacations, just as the earth has no vacations," he says. "The earth keeps turning all the time, and we turn all the time—even when we are dead. The earth does not sleep. It turns with us." And remarkably, at the age of 78, Chagall turns ever faster, feeling ever closer to the rhythm of nature.
If there is an occasional cloud, it is the thought of how swiftly time has flown since he first arrived, a bedazzled Russian Jew, to greet Paris a full half-century ago. Of the pre-World War I luminaries that were then his contemporaries—the Frenchmen Braque, Matisse, Léger, Rouault, Delaunay, Villon, the Spaniard Juan Gris, the Rumanian Sculptor Brancusi, the Italian Modigliani, the Russians Kandinsky and Soutine—only Picasso, now 83, remains of those who gave the School of Paris its start. Of the two principal survivors, Picasso is the most protean and cerebral, Chagall the most constant champion of the heart.
Critics have always hailed Chagall's early inventive flights of fantasy, often comparing him to Stravinsky in music, but the art establishment until recently has tended to judge his major accomplishments over by 1922. His popularity, however, remained undimmed for the broadly buying art public, who often preferred his graphic works to Picasso's. Even those who have charged him with sentimentality have never accused him of indifference to mankind.