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Only belatedly have museums realized that the history of modern art would seem vacuously cold without Chagall's tender, sometimes desperate exhortation to love life joyfully. "It's absolutely essential to have him," says Los Angeles County Museum Director Richard Brown. Adds a London dealer: "The one painter sought by all museums is Chagall. He has already become an old master."
As the chronology of his art shows (see color pages), few modern artists have passed through so many seasons of art with such persistent vision. For Chagall has lived through all the century's artisticisms, from cubism and surrealism to tachisme, and embraced none. Instead he has remained steadfast in the pursuit of his own midsummer night's dream, emptying it and re-emptying it, until it has become a distillation, universal in its appeal. Today his art is enjoyed by millions all over the world—whenever they pick up one of the books he illustrated, pray in the sanctuaries he has touched with color, or listen to the music graced by his scenes and settings.
Rainbow Period. The man who has presented his work as a bouquet to the world is now just entering his rainbow period. His colors, blinding enough in his beginnings to win the approval of the German expressionists, grow steadily stronger. He is so well known today that even French working girls recognize him as "le type who paints cows that fly."
There are pots of gold, too, to grace his rainbow period. Museums, which were at first slow to acquire his paintings, now find them skyrocketing out of sight and pocket. Today his oils regularly fetch from $50,000 to $55,000, and his record auction price of $82,500 last April has already been nearly doubled in private sales. His original signed and numbered lithographs bring up to $1,200; his watercolors are priced as high as $15,000.
Chagall's reaction to all this is to work harder. "He takes so many commissions so that he will not have time to die," says a New York dealer and longtime friend. Although Chagall does not seek them out, he now finds himself engulfed with the monumental public commissions that rarely come to crown the career of a great artist. Only in his 60s did he learn to stain glass. Since then, in a torrent of production, he has done two windows for the Metz Cathedral, followed by twelve windows for the Hadassah Medical Center's synagogue in Jerusalem. Last fall he finished a memorial glass panel at the United Nations for the late Dag Hammarskjold and another for the Rockefeller family's church. In total, his stained glass immeasurably enriches this century's wealth in an arcane craft. He has tackled another long-neglected art: weavers in the famous Gobelins tapestry works are even now finishing a triptych of Old Testament hangings for Israel's Knesset.