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Time ticks in the Chagall household as relentlessly as the swinging clocks in his own paintings, and yet what drives him onward is no longer any anxiety about his place in the history of art. By the judgment of his peers, that place is secure. Picasso has judged him from afar favorably. "When Matisse dies," he once told Francoise Gilot, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." Georges Braque knew Chagall only toward the end of his life, but he was impressed: "Now that I know the man, I see that he is a guarantor of painting. I like it." Said Joan Miró in Spain recently, "Marc Chagall is an authentic colorist, a painter who seeks to express his soul through the polychromy of his palette. He has exerted a greater influence on the succeeding generation than upon his contemporaries."
True, some of the very qualities that speak directly to Chagall's admirers have proven stumbling blocks to critics, such as Yale Art Historian George Heard Hamilton, who feels his art is "high-class kitsch," because it is too "pretty." It is a view opposed by the Museum of Modern Art's Peter Selz: "Chagall is one of the truly popular artists of the century. He has combined the formal exploration of the cubists with his own personal, whimsical fantasy."
Rosettes & Symbols. Chagall is a Jew, though not a particularly devout one. And though he detests the classification of Jewish artist, still he has never tried to escape from his origins and cannot banish them from his mind. Unquestionably, the tradition of the Hasidic sect, which seeks to blend the soul with God through trancelike levitation of the heart, helped to prepare the painter for a mysticism that rarely finds expression in Western art. The flavor of Sholom Aleichem's shtetl still colors Chagall's dealings with the world.
Observes Paris' Musée National d'Art Moderne Curator Jean Cassou: "Chagall is one of his own images. He is the manager of his own fairyland." His modesty is positively immodest. When people call him maître, he will reply: "No, centimètre." When Notre Dame awarded him an honorary doctorate of fine arts (his third) this spring, Chagall commented wryly: "I am three times a doctor, arid I know nothing." After receiving the red rosette of the commander in the Légion d'Honneur, he shrugged it off with "Isn't it terrible that De Gaulle and Malraux make me work for the state?"
Yet Chagall profoundly doubts that his fantasy world and the psychic realities underlying it are exclusively Jewish. Critic Harold Rosenberg agrees, saying: "Chagall is using Jews the same way that the surrealists used clowns—as interesting, exotic objects." Says Jean Cassou: "If Chagall had been a Norman peasant, he would have had the same dreams with Norman memories." And Britain's Sir Herbert Read comments:
"There are experimentalists, like Picasso, and those who, like Braque, discover their personal equation and go on repeating it. Chagall belongs to the second category. What is important is that an artist find a symbolic mode of expression. Chagall made this discovery."