Trechos de Marc Chagall And His Times: A Documentary Narrative (2003), de Benjamin Harshav.
On June 15, 1914, after the opening of his Berlin exhibition, Chagall took a train to his parents' home in Vitebsk, to attend his sister's wedding. World War I broke out in August, and, very rcluctantly, he got stuck in Russia. He resumed his friendship with Berta Rosenfeld, and they were married on July 25, 1915.
Contrary to some Russian patriotic notions, Chagall was quite ambivalent about his "homeland" and was unhappy about getting trapped there. In a letter to Sonia Delaunay in Paris of November 20, 1914, he refers to "our homeland ... where I got stuck involuntarily"; and on October 1, 1917, he wrote to A. Benois: "If fate preserves me, I and my family may not be Russia's guests much longer." Of course, during World War I and the subsequent Civil War, it was impossible to go to the West and Chagall tried to make the best of it. After the Revolution, he may have been tempted by the openings for modern art and for himself, which the October Revolution seemed to provide, and was swept up by the revolutionary elan and rhetoric. But as soon as he could, he left for Paris.
- - -
[Autumn 1914]
[Russian] Most honorable Aleksandr Nikolayevich.
May I send you some pictures (studies done in Russia) for your prestigious exhibition? Finding myself here because of the war. I am quite bored (oh, horror of our age!), and l would be happy about it.
[...] three big pictures (you may not like them, but I have lost my head over them) are stuck in Amsterdam in the Salon. Just before the war, the Committee informed me they were sold, but I had no time to receive [the payment] before the war broke out.
Two other pictures remained in Brussels. All other works I have left are in the gallery of my patron Charles Malpel, who signed a contract with me this May - wasn't he killed?
So that's enough. Let us wait for news about the advances of the Russian generals from the Commander in Chief (I love him and will definitely do his portrait).
Respectfully, Marc Chagall
Vitebsk, Pokrovskaya, private house [his parents' home]
- - -
[Postcard sent at the beginning of World War I from Russia to France. Stamped: "Vitebsk/Railroad Station" (near his parents' house) 20.11.14. Stamped: "War Censonhip." The postcard was addressed to Paris and forwarded to "Poste restante à Fontarabie (Espagne)" where the pacifist Robert Delaunay spent the war years.]
[Russian] Here I am writing you & few words from our homeland where I somehow got from Berlin and where I got stuck involuntarily. I would be happy to get a word from you [Mrs. Delaunay]: how are you, where is Robert, how is the fate of our friends contemporaries acquaintances artists and writers? What happened to all our impulses and aspirations? ... I send you my regards from Russia, from its depths, where the Russian people rose so beautifully to defend its future. And this gives me joy. I am longing for Paris. As to my exhibition [in Berlin], alas, against its will it became a prisoner of war. I squeeze your hands.
Regards, Chagall
- - -
At the end of 1914, Chagall was conscripted into the army, but apparently did not serve before his marriage in july 1915. After the honeymoon in Zaolshe (the summer residence of the Lubavich Rebbe). Moysey and Berta Chagall left for Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed during the war). He claimed that his new wife wanted "culture" in a big city, while he preferred to stay in quiet nature. Berta's brother Yakov Rosenfeld, who headed an army economics department in the Central War-Industrial Committee, arranged a convenient, clerical position in army service in the capital for Chagall, who could thus go on painting and exhibiting in Petrograd and Moscow. Strictures against Jews residing in the capitals were apparently relaxed during the war, and there were even special exhibitions of Russian Jewish artists in Moscow, where nominally they were forbidden to live. Furthermore, the radical left in art, which had snubbed him just four years earlier, now accepted Chagall and granted him plenty of exhibition room (forty-five works in the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow, November 1916).
Several reviews of Chagall's exhibited work were published, some praising, some scoffing, but always spirited and argumentative. One Russian reviewer wrote:
No writer of the [anti-Semitic] Black Hundreds described the Jews in such an ugly form as Marc Chagall from Vitebsk. Why do the Jews have to be so dirty, with such idiotic and animal looks! Odessa anecdotes are disgusting, but these Vitebsk anecdotes are even more intolerable. And a whole Hall [of the exhibition] was given over to them! This is what the most modern art is like!
- - -
Chagall feels not just the provinces, he responds also to European contemporaneity. His soldiers holding loaves of bread, brave bread bakers, the stomach of the army, are painted with amazing mastery and agility. His "sister" with scarlet lips and underlined femininity of her clothes - like a symbol of all that healthy, encouraging and life-awakening element, which a woman brings into the weary business of war. On the contrary, his "Prussians" have something miserable, dull, earthy, condemned to the soil. Some may not like Chagall's "war" paintings, but they are valuable in that, where other painters hail the iron and wooden beauties, he senses the human face. In our days, when mechanical culture challenges the whole world, and artists still don't want to understand that their painterly bric-a-brac derives from the same Futurist devil - art that has love for the world and man, that has lyricism, is important.
[...] Perhaps precisely from this untouched, naïve provincial backwoods, a desired light will pour upon our metropolitan art, which performs a feast in time of plague; and produce fresh strength that a renovated Russia will pave the way for.
- - -
[This letter was written in the tense days before the October Revolution, described in Chapter XIV of Chagall's autobiography, when Chagall was dismissed from the army and he and his family were floating with no support under the disintegrating "Temporary" regime. ln March 1917, the influential Benois organized a powerful Committee for Matters of Art to negotiate with the temporary government about the preservation of art and antiquities in time of turmoil. After the Bolshevik Revolution, in November 1917, he was appointed Director of the Hermitage Art Gallery in Petrograd, and was severely attacked as a "reactionary" by major figures of "Leftist" art (Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Shklovsky).]
1/X 1917 [October 1]
[Russian] Most Esteemed Aleksandr Nikolayevich.
[...] External circumstances, which I cannot sympathize with from any aspect, forced me to do something, for the last tedious three years to serve in one of the departments of the War-Industrial Committee.
Naturally, in those three years I did almost no work (I do not count the Vitebsk series made in the middle and end of 1914, before my [army] service). No matter how hard and fruitless my plight may be (not just mine). I would have reconciled myself to it (for how long?), but the Committee was evacuated from Petrograd, departments and positions of the staff were reduced, and I became a superfluous person.
- - -
ln October 1917, cuts in the army department where Chagall worked made him "redundant." Shortly after, the "October Revolution" (actually, November 7) took place. Lenin called on the millions of soldiers to leave the front and go home. The Russian army disintegrated, and Chagall was no longer bound by his military service. In the great anarchy, Petrograd was starving and freezing. Chagall took his family back to the safety of their parents' home in Vitebsk, near the countryside, where there was some food, and didn't even say goodbye to his gallery owner.
- - -
[Russian] Director of the Dobychina Gallery in Petrograd, 1918.
12/III 1918, Vitebsk
Dear Nadezhda Evseevna!
I am writing from here. I didn't have time to see you before I left [Petrograd]. I was in a hurry, excited - I could have gone on foot ... Now I am here [in Vitebsk]. This is my town and my tomb ... Here I open like the tobacco flower at night ... I am working. May God help me!
After all, it seems to me that He exists. He won't leave us, and at the last minute, save us. How are you? Say hello to Petr Petrovich, regards from my wife. Write someday.
I imagine that the times are awful and you probably have a hard time. But don't get discouraged. I am learning to live on "the holy spirit," it is so easy!
Regards,
Your Chagall
- - -
CHAGALL AS COMMISSAR OF ART IN VITEBSK: 1918-1920
The October Revolution of 1917 promoted a new language of hope, even exuberance, about the unlimited possibilities now open to the people. This mood was embraced by many of the intelligentsia who stayed in Russia, and was especially supported by the avant-garde trends in all the arts. The Revolutionary discourse could be read as cognate to the discourse of the avant-garde: both were on the "left" and both radically discarded the past. Furthermore, the new situation granted young artists and intellectuals a sense of importance and positions of power, as well as, simply, bread. Many old intellectuals left for the West, and all cultural and academic positions, expanding rapidly, opened up for supporters of the new system.
A special sense of freedom and participation as equals in the new regime was felt by young Jews, who were liberated from their isolation and second-class citizenship, and from the need to be trapped in the category "Jewish"; since religion was abolished (and they rejected religion altogether), they were now "Russians" sanctioned by the regime. For a while, Chagall shared that excitement. The screams of Revolutionary slogans drowned out the harsh daily realities. The selected documents published here show the enthusiasm, power, infighting, and confusion of the early days of the Revolution.
- - -
On November 6, 1918, the eve of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik October Revolution, Chagall organized the decorating of the city with colorful posters painted by several artists, including himself, copied by their pupils and hung all over Vitebsk. A. Efros recalled: "In Vitebsk, Marc Chagall (Commissar Marc Chagall!) painted Chagallesques on all banners and raised a flag above the city, showing him, Chagall, riding a green horse, flying above Vitehsk and blowing a horn: 'CHAGALL - TO VITEBSK'."
The former mansion of the Jewish banker Israel V. Vishnyak at Voskresenskaya ("Resurrection") St. 10, now renamed after one of the leaders of the Revolution Bukharin St., was turned over to the new People's Art College and Art Museum by decree of the City Management Department of October 18, 1918. The house was officially nationalized on November 10, 1918. We have no evidence about Chagall's role in the confiscation of Vishnyak's house, but as the Plenipotentiary on Matters of Art in Vitebsk Province, he must have been involved in it.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIUmgweE5KYnlaejA
http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/1055
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerensky_Offensive
Contrary to some Russian patriotic notions, Chagall was quite ambivalent about his "homeland" and was unhappy about getting trapped there. In a letter to Sonia Delaunay in Paris of November 20, 1914, he refers to "our homeland ... where I got stuck involuntarily"; and on October 1, 1917, he wrote to A. Benois: "If fate preserves me, I and my family may not be Russia's guests much longer." Of course, during World War I and the subsequent Civil War, it was impossible to go to the West and Chagall tried to make the best of it. After the Revolution, he may have been tempted by the openings for modern art and for himself, which the October Revolution seemed to provide, and was swept up by the revolutionary elan and rhetoric. But as soon as he could, he left for Paris.
- - -
[Autumn 1914]
[Russian] Most honorable Aleksandr Nikolayevich.
May I send you some pictures (studies done in Russia) for your prestigious exhibition? Finding myself here because of the war. I am quite bored (oh, horror of our age!), and l would be happy about it.
[...] three big pictures (you may not like them, but I have lost my head over them) are stuck in Amsterdam in the Salon. Just before the war, the Committee informed me they were sold, but I had no time to receive [the payment] before the war broke out.
Two other pictures remained in Brussels. All other works I have left are in the gallery of my patron Charles Malpel, who signed a contract with me this May - wasn't he killed?
So that's enough. Let us wait for news about the advances of the Russian generals from the Commander in Chief (I love him and will definitely do his portrait).
Respectfully, Marc Chagall
Vitebsk, Pokrovskaya, private house [his parents' home]
- - -
[Postcard sent at the beginning of World War I from Russia to France. Stamped: "Vitebsk/Railroad Station" (near his parents' house) 20.11.14. Stamped: "War Censonhip." The postcard was addressed to Paris and forwarded to "Poste restante à Fontarabie (Espagne)" where the pacifist Robert Delaunay spent the war years.]
[Russian] Here I am writing you & few words from our homeland where I somehow got from Berlin and where I got stuck involuntarily. I would be happy to get a word from you [Mrs. Delaunay]: how are you, where is Robert, how is the fate of our friends contemporaries acquaintances artists and writers? What happened to all our impulses and aspirations? ... I send you my regards from Russia, from its depths, where the Russian people rose so beautifully to defend its future. And this gives me joy. I am longing for Paris. As to my exhibition [in Berlin], alas, against its will it became a prisoner of war. I squeeze your hands.
Regards, Chagall
- - -
At the end of 1914, Chagall was conscripted into the army, but apparently did not serve before his marriage in july 1915. After the honeymoon in Zaolshe (the summer residence of the Lubavich Rebbe). Moysey and Berta Chagall left for Petrograd (as St. Petersburg was renamed during the war). He claimed that his new wife wanted "culture" in a big city, while he preferred to stay in quiet nature. Berta's brother Yakov Rosenfeld, who headed an army economics department in the Central War-Industrial Committee, arranged a convenient, clerical position in army service in the capital for Chagall, who could thus go on painting and exhibiting in Petrograd and Moscow. Strictures against Jews residing in the capitals were apparently relaxed during the war, and there were even special exhibitions of Russian Jewish artists in Moscow, where nominally they were forbidden to live. Furthermore, the radical left in art, which had snubbed him just four years earlier, now accepted Chagall and granted him plenty of exhibition room (forty-five works in the Jack of Diamonds exhibition in Moscow, November 1916).
Several reviews of Chagall's exhibited work were published, some praising, some scoffing, but always spirited and argumentative. One Russian reviewer wrote:
No writer of the [anti-Semitic] Black Hundreds described the Jews in such an ugly form as Marc Chagall from Vitebsk. Why do the Jews have to be so dirty, with such idiotic and animal looks! Odessa anecdotes are disgusting, but these Vitebsk anecdotes are even more intolerable. And a whole Hall [of the exhibition] was given over to them! This is what the most modern art is like!
- - -
Chagall feels not just the provinces, he responds also to European contemporaneity. His soldiers holding loaves of bread, brave bread bakers, the stomach of the army, are painted with amazing mastery and agility. His "sister" with scarlet lips and underlined femininity of her clothes - like a symbol of all that healthy, encouraging and life-awakening element, which a woman brings into the weary business of war. On the contrary, his "Prussians" have something miserable, dull, earthy, condemned to the soil. Some may not like Chagall's "war" paintings, but they are valuable in that, where other painters hail the iron and wooden beauties, he senses the human face. In our days, when mechanical culture challenges the whole world, and artists still don't want to understand that their painterly bric-a-brac derives from the same Futurist devil - art that has love for the world and man, that has lyricism, is important.
[...] Perhaps precisely from this untouched, naïve provincial backwoods, a desired light will pour upon our metropolitan art, which performs a feast in time of plague; and produce fresh strength that a renovated Russia will pave the way for.
- - -
[This letter was written in the tense days before the October Revolution, described in Chapter XIV of Chagall's autobiography, when Chagall was dismissed from the army and he and his family were floating with no support under the disintegrating "Temporary" regime. ln March 1917, the influential Benois organized a powerful Committee for Matters of Art to negotiate with the temporary government about the preservation of art and antiquities in time of turmoil. After the Bolshevik Revolution, in November 1917, he was appointed Director of the Hermitage Art Gallery in Petrograd, and was severely attacked as a "reactionary" by major figures of "Leftist" art (Meyerhold, Mayakovsky, Shklovsky).]
1/X 1917 [October 1]
[Russian] Most Esteemed Aleksandr Nikolayevich.
[...] External circumstances, which I cannot sympathize with from any aspect, forced me to do something, for the last tedious three years to serve in one of the departments of the War-Industrial Committee.
Naturally, in those three years I did almost no work (I do not count the Vitebsk series made in the middle and end of 1914, before my [army] service). No matter how hard and fruitless my plight may be (not just mine). I would have reconciled myself to it (for how long?), but the Committee was evacuated from Petrograd, departments and positions of the staff were reduced, and I became a superfluous person.
- - -
ln October 1917, cuts in the army department where Chagall worked made him "redundant." Shortly after, the "October Revolution" (actually, November 7) took place. Lenin called on the millions of soldiers to leave the front and go home. The Russian army disintegrated, and Chagall was no longer bound by his military service. In the great anarchy, Petrograd was starving and freezing. Chagall took his family back to the safety of their parents' home in Vitebsk, near the countryside, where there was some food, and didn't even say goodbye to his gallery owner.
- - -
[Russian] Director of the Dobychina Gallery in Petrograd, 1918.
12/III 1918, Vitebsk
Dear Nadezhda Evseevna!
I am writing from here. I didn't have time to see you before I left [Petrograd]. I was in a hurry, excited - I could have gone on foot ... Now I am here [in Vitebsk]. This is my town and my tomb ... Here I open like the tobacco flower at night ... I am working. May God help me!
After all, it seems to me that He exists. He won't leave us, and at the last minute, save us. How are you? Say hello to Petr Petrovich, regards from my wife. Write someday.
I imagine that the times are awful and you probably have a hard time. But don't get discouraged. I am learning to live on "the holy spirit," it is so easy!
Regards,
Your Chagall
- - -
CHAGALL AS COMMISSAR OF ART IN VITEBSK: 1918-1920
The October Revolution of 1917 promoted a new language of hope, even exuberance, about the unlimited possibilities now open to the people. This mood was embraced by many of the intelligentsia who stayed in Russia, and was especially supported by the avant-garde trends in all the arts. The Revolutionary discourse could be read as cognate to the discourse of the avant-garde: both were on the "left" and both radically discarded the past. Furthermore, the new situation granted young artists and intellectuals a sense of importance and positions of power, as well as, simply, bread. Many old intellectuals left for the West, and all cultural and academic positions, expanding rapidly, opened up for supporters of the new system.
A special sense of freedom and participation as equals in the new regime was felt by young Jews, who were liberated from their isolation and second-class citizenship, and from the need to be trapped in the category "Jewish"; since religion was abolished (and they rejected religion altogether), they were now "Russians" sanctioned by the regime. For a while, Chagall shared that excitement. The screams of Revolutionary slogans drowned out the harsh daily realities. The selected documents published here show the enthusiasm, power, infighting, and confusion of the early days of the Revolution.
- - -
On November 6, 1918, the eve of the first anniversary of the Bolshevik October Revolution, Chagall organized the decorating of the city with colorful posters painted by several artists, including himself, copied by their pupils and hung all over Vitebsk. A. Efros recalled: "In Vitebsk, Marc Chagall (Commissar Marc Chagall!) painted Chagallesques on all banners and raised a flag above the city, showing him, Chagall, riding a green horse, flying above Vitehsk and blowing a horn: 'CHAGALL - TO VITEBSK'."
The former mansion of the Jewish banker Israel V. Vishnyak at Voskresenskaya ("Resurrection") St. 10, now renamed after one of the leaders of the Revolution Bukharin St., was turned over to the new People's Art College and Art Museum by decree of the City Management Department of October 18, 1918. The house was officially nationalized on November 10, 1918. We have no evidence about Chagall's role in the confiscation of Vishnyak's house, but as the Plenipotentiary on Matters of Art in Vitebsk Province, he must have been involved in it.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIUmgweE5KYnlaejA
http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/1055
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerensky_Offensive
