Marc Chagall: Colour My World
Marc Chagall Blue Circus 1950–2 Courtesy Centre Pompidou Paris © Adagp/Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCi / Dist.RMN
The Art Gallery of Ontario has hit some populist high notes in its recent programming, and “Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris” is no exception. This is a show where one of the most reproduction-friendly artists of the 20th century is paired with just enough avant-gardist company to make an interesting statement about the fortunes of Russian modernism. There’s drama in surrounding Chagall with the likes of Kandinsky, Malevich, Tatlin and the Stenberg brothers. It signals a liftoff into the realm of pure abstraction that pulls Chagall further into the reach of 20th-century art than is usually his due. Some nifty staging of historical didactic material puts him into the thick of revolutionary times and influence, making him a man all of piece with his era.
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Marc Chagall Cemetery Gates 1917 Courtesy Centre Pompidou Paris © Adagp/Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCi / Dist.RMN |
What also stands out, of course, is how unlike his era Chagall also was. His art is driven by a dreamy nostalgia that draws on the graphic energies of modernist formal invention, but gives a pass to its futurist mindset. Chagall’s memorializing art is about family and friends and local experience. The evaporation and destruction of the world he grew up in lends a pathos that puts the art beyond the narrower limits of art history. Time and again in the show—as in a family portrait where the artist’s wild hair and leaning head breaks through the decorum—Chagall won’t settle down to being a modernist or a Russian. He is the mystical Chagall, the artist who learned to draw on the unabashed colour of French painting to tell vivid Jewish stories of love and loss. That the softness of his outlook and his touch stands up to the more programmatic, ambitious art of his era might just be the most topical aspect of the show.
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Marc Chagall Double Portrait with Wine Glass 1917–8 Courtesy Centre Pompidou Paris © Adagp/Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCi / Dist.RMN |
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Marc Chagall To Russia, Donkeys and Others 1911 Courtesy Centre Pompidou Paris © Adagp/Centre Pompidou, Mnam-CCi / Dist.RMN |
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