Product Description

Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall’s work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to “narrate” the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice.

Wilson brilliantly demonstrates how Marc Chagall’s life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in New York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present.

Wilson’s portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe–showing us how Chagall is the emblematic Jewish artist of the twentieth century.

Visit nextbook.org/chagall for a virtual museum of Chagall images.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #207396 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-13
• Released on: 2007-03-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Born Moishe Shagal in 1887, the son of a poor Orthodox Jewish laborer drew lifelong inspiration from his native Vitebsk, Belorussia. Chagall became famous for painting explosively colorful rooftop fiddlers, airborne cows and lovers floating above onion-domed churches, and a tallith-wrapped crucified Jesus. A victim of anti-Semitism who was ambivalent about his role as a Jewish artist, Chagall adorned churches and synagogues with stained-glass windows and often chose Christ as his symbol of martyrdom when depicting Jewish tragedies. Chagall's road to fame is mapped out by Wilson: his exposure, as a St. Petersburg student, to Matisse's dazzling palette; feverishly productive early years in Paris, where he absorbed an array of artistic influences; his immersion in politics in postrevolution Vitebsk, where he founded an art school; his return to Paris, where the legendary Vollard became his art dealer; and his New York exile during the Holocaust, where his beloved wife, Bella, died (he lived on for four more decades). Wilson's critiques (particularly of Chagall's "slippery" identity and his work's supposed sentimentality) are familiar, and this is less a fresh biography than a synthesis of writings by Benjamin Harshav, Chagall and his intimates. But Wilson (A Palestine Affair) is an incisive, lively writer. Domestic photos are included, but the omission of color reproductions of Chagall's oeuvre in this entry in the Jewish Encounters series is frustrating. (Mar. 13)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Chagall's bewitching paintings of flying lovers, otherworldly cows, and enormous floating bouquets appear to be joyously romantic and exuberantly folkloric, but in fact they are poetic memorials to a doomed world. Chagall, a "master of color" who painted right up until his death at 97 in 1985, survived the brutal anti-Semitism of czarist and Soviet Russia, lost hundreds of paintings during World War I, and barely avoided the concentration camps when he fled Vichy France. Novelist Wilson, whose inventive way with words perfectly matches his subject's topsy-turvy visual lexicon, succeeds in illuminating in fresh and penetrating ways the mysteries and sorrows inherent in Chagall's complex work. He elucidates the influence of Hasidic mysticism, speculates about Chagall's chameleon-like personality and possible sexual ambiguity, eloquently articulates Chagall's "Orphic/Cubist" aesthetic, and revels in Chagall's best works. Wilson also cogently analyzes the Jewish painter's obsession with Christ and unsettling use of the Crucifixion as "an icon of Jewish suffering." Ultimately, Wilson portrays Chagall as an artist trapped between "apparently irreconcilable worlds that could only be unified in his work." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
Praise for Jonathan Wilson’s A Palestine Affair

“Like the best of historical fiction, Wilson’s story is placed in an imagined past, but it is really happening right now . . . You’re likely to stay up late reading.”
– The Washington Post Book World

“An engrossing, complex, and fearless tale of politics, arts, murder, sex, and history (personal and global).”
–Anita Diamant, author of The Red Tent

“A Palestine Affair evokes, quite tangibly, the days of the Mandate. This is a true and touching act of the imagination. The book’s very sexy, a nostalgic and provocative envisioning of that time. I recommend it highly.”
–David Mamet

“Worth reading? An Englishman might say: ‘Rather.’ An American would put it differently: ‘You bet it is!’ “
–Saul Bellow


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Icon of Modernism
The reader turns the first page of this little book to see the 1929 oil on canvas painting, "Lovers" by Marc Chagall. The painting depicts a man and woman seated and embracing; the woman's head turned inward on the man's breast, while the man, an expression of calm and contentment, peers upward, watching a winged angel flying overhead, across a deep purple sky. The painting has the deep and rich signature colour of all Chagall's work, though lacks the intense emotional suffering and ambivalence that makes up so much of his oeuvre, however this painting evokes a mystical love, a true love which, in my opinion, expresses the relationship between the artist and his beautiful wife, Bella.

As part of the Jewish Encounter project, Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson is one contribution devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas. (One can find all these contributions here on Amazon.)

It can be observed that most of Chagall's work, according to the author, is an expression of his philosophy, his religious sensibility if you will, in the form of the "literalization of metaphors", deeply grounded in the mystical and symbolic Hasidic world and Yiddish folktales, which include in their writings the "repository of flying animals and miraculous events." (P. 13)

It is impossible to label Chagall's work as "Expressionism", but the representation of an acute imagination, coloured in fantasy, depicting highly charged religious symbols, including in several works, Christs Crucifixion in a variety of contexts. What I love about Chagall is the viewer is drawn into the work by its striking colour and busy subject matter and is compelled to study it, because the meaning of the painting must be discovered as it is not apparent on a superficial viewing.

Wilson does a wonderful job of narrating Chagall's life in terms of the major events that the artist experienced, spanning through the Russian revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. Wilson suggests that in viewing Chagall's paintings against the backdrop of these major historical events will see the artist's work as a response to them, and his personal inner conflict between his "Jewishness" and his focus on Christ's Crucifixion, and also his attempt at secularism in many of his paintings.

My favourite paintings by the artist are his various representations of love that display an ethereal, mystical quality, a sublimeness that to me captures love in their most revealing forms, as Wilson comments,

"Chagall's vision of love, so appealing to the human soul, frequently involves a merging of two faces, or bodies, into one. In this regard he is Platonic, as his figures pursue their other halves in an apparent longing to become whole again. Over and again he paints the myth that Aristophanes recounts in The Symposium." (P.174)

Chagall's life Wilson suggests was an attempt through his art at the reconciliation between two worlds, a genuine effort universalizing or merging opposites, he writes,

"In his paintings, past and present, dream and reality, rabbi and clown, secular and observant, revolutionary and Jew, Jesus and Elijah...all commingle and merge in a world where history and geography but also the laws of physics and nature have been suspended." (P. 210)

Wilson's Marc Chagall is an erudite biography and insightful critical work. Although relatively short in length, manages to capture the artist who is considered along with Picasso and Matisse, one of the icons of Modernism.

A Short Chagall
A nice short study of Marc Chagall's personal life (wives, children, and homes) and of his essential cultural roots including religious inspirations and conflicts. Chagall was fated to live a long life amidst a century of enormous social turmoil and with direct emotional ties to countries in the middle of the storms --- the USSR, France, U.S. and Israel.

Professor Wilson is a fine writer with an eye for the arresting detail. His book is a very good overview of the complex life of a great artist.

(Readers will have to refer to the Internet or art books for the actual paintings referred to in this text---unless happily they have already in person viewed the work of Marc Chagall.)

Marc Chagall
This has made a fascinating artist even more interesting; and you can understand the impact of his life on his technique!