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In that same year, Chagall was made commissioner of fine arts in Vitebsk by the newly formed Soviet government, and as a commissar he rapidly demonstrated that he was a divine idiot. He called for "revolutionary painters" and peppered the local party press with commissarty exhortations. His vision of the revolution was to make "ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator." Imagining that all the house painters of his native town were repressed artists, he spurred them on to decorating its drab buildings with folk imagery. When his superiors arrived from Moscow to find the walls covered with Chagallesque cows sailing through the sky instead of the standard portraits of Marx and Lenin, Chagall discovered belatedly that the Communists wanted art to be as pragmatic as a tractor. Everything rained on his parade; when he decked out the town with 50,000 ft. of patriotic red bunting, Izvestia wondered sarcastically how many much-needed suits of underwear could have been made of it.
The Last Ism. Soviet critics, too, were soon after Chagall's hide, dubbing his misbegotten revolution in art a "mystic and formalistic bacchanal." But the purge came from the quarter he least expected. He had hired two painters, Malevich and Lissitzky, members of the suprematist school of painting, to teach in Vitebsk's Free Academy. One day he returned from Moscow to find that they had taken over the school, and based its new curriculum on their brand of geometrical abstraction and pure objectivity.
Thoroughly routed at home, he left for Moscow in 1920 to turn his attention to the theater, painting murals for Moscow's Kamerny State Jewish Theater and designing sets and costumes for adaptations of Sholom Aleichem's satirical tales. But his sets for Synge's Playboy of the Western World, commingling geometry, Hebrew characters and dislocated figures in iconographic puzzles, were rejected as not naturalistic enough by the Moscow Art Theater. And so, having rejected all the isms of Paris, Chagall found himself rejected by Communism. In 1922, Chagall left Russia with $20, clad in khaki trousers provided by Hoover relief. Bella and his six-year-old daughter Ida followed. He never returned.
He stopped in Berlin long enough to discover that in place of 40 oils and 160 smaller works he had left with a dealer, there were one million worthless reichsmarks—at the same time that a single Chagall was being auctioned for a hundred times more. And, when he got to Paris, the canvases locked up in his La Ruche studio were gone. They had been sold into private hands, and his reputation had spread with them. He was famous at last—and dead broke.