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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
With all the dirty passion of a little Jewish town
With all the exacerbated sexuality of provincial Russia.
No Square Peas. With such paintings as I and the Village, done in 1911, Chagall launched his own inimitable style. The painting blazes with a spectrum that vaults beyond the impressionists' naturalistic colored light and into a mystic realm. The imagery performs flip-flops, a peasant woman turns topsy below inverted roofs. Perspective is abandoned to a personal scale that adjusts the size of images to their importance. So a huge cow and a man nuzzle, centering on a vortex of color that abolishes depth. Like the flat saints of old Russian icons, his images beckon contemplation, summoning memories from the mind. It is the scenery of a child building dreams in a darkened bedroom.
Chagall learned some of the discipline of the cubists. But he resisted their dissection of form. "Let them eat their fill of their square peas on their triangular tables!" he wrote. Nevertheless, something of Cartesian logic crept into his fantasies; his pictures took on orderly geometry; his images lost traditional figure-ground relationships and, instead, flattened against the picture plane in search of purely visual values. Said Chagall: "For me, a painting is a surface covered with representations of things— objects, animals, human beings— in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance."
Cubism, however, was queen of art at the time; Chagall, who only knew Picasso casually, was out of the swim. His paintings at the Salon des Indépendants drew little acclaim and no money. Today, his paintings of 1910-14 are the most valuable and the most fascinating to art historians, who see in them the first stirrings of surrealism. The first person to recognize them at the time was Guillaume Apollinaire, poet and influential art critic, who muttered that Chagall was "supernatural." Apollinaire rushed home to dash off a poem titled Rotsoge (a poetic moniker, deliberately foreign-sounding, by which he addressed Chagall), describing him as having hair like "the trolley cable across Europe arrayed in little many-colored fires." He did Chagall a better favor by instigating a show in 1914 in Berlin. It was a sensation with the German expressionists.
Patriotic Bunting. Chagall continued back to Vitebsk from Berlin, then war broke out leaving his work cached in Paris and Berlin. Once home, he married his childhood sweetheart, the darkly sensual Bella Rosenfeld, Moscow-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant. It was the great love of his life, and he celebrated it in his exuberant 1918 Double Portrait with a Wineglass, in which a violet-stockinged Bella holds the artist up in the air, lifting him joyously above the streets, while an angel representing their daughter Ida hovers overhead.