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Dead Souls & Fables. To Chagall's astonishment, he also found himself heralded as one of the fathers of surrealism. Painters saw in his double-headed man in Paris Through the Window (1913), in his dream imagery and topsy-turvy juxtaposition of men and beasts the very quality they were striving for. Proclaimed Surrealism's high priest, André Breton: "With Chagall alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return into modern painting." In 1923, a surrealist delegation of Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and Gala (now Salvador Dali's wife) actually knelt before Chagall, begging him to join their ranks. Another ism! He refused. "I want an art of the earth and not merely an art of the head," he said, and isolated himself in the French landscape.
A curious Arcadian peace settled down over Chagall during his middle years. Ambroise Vollard, the famous Paris art dealer who had shepherded Cézanne, Bonnard and Gauguin, sensed the iconographer in the Russian expatriate and set him to the task of illustrating Gogol's Dead Souls. Enthusiastically, Chagall mastered the new medium of etching. It gave him financial security and widened his popularity. The results, in their innocent whimsy, were an instant success, leading Dealer Vollard to commission the artist to illustrate the Fables of La Fontaine. That a Russian Jew should illustrate a French classic created a scandal in those days. But Vollard knew that the oriental origins of La Fontaine's 17th century tales could best be pictured with Chagall's folk-tinged, modern icons. He did a hundred gouaches in color for the book, but they were too subtle in hue to reproduce; so he redid them all as etchings in black and white.
Ask the Impossible. By far his most challenging adventure in graphics was Vollard's commission to illustrate the Bible. To prepare, Chagall wanted to visit the Holy Land, but Vollard said, "Don't bother! Why not go instead to the Place Pigalle?" He went to Palestine anyway in 1931, just as he traveled to Holland in 1932 to study Rembrandt, to Spain in 1934 to study El Greco, to Poland in 1935 to examine Nazi-threatened Jewish traditions, and to Italy in 1937 to study the early Renaissance. By the time of Vollard's death in 1939, Chagall had completed 66 plates for the Bible. In 1957, his Bible was published with 105 plates, honest, human, without halos, always proceeding from God's word to the image. These ventures into the graphic arts alone would have ensured his eminence, for he had mastered etching and lithography like a master printer. No detail was too small. One artisan recalls that Chagall pointed out a minuscule mistake in the first strike of a lithograph, after three months reviewed the proof and immediately demanded to know why the error had not been corrected. Says he, "Chagall always asks the impossible."