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BC-CHAGALL-OBIT Undated 4takes
By JOHN RUSSELL
c.1985 N.Y. Times News Service
    Marc Chagall, for 75 years a prominent member of the international
art scene, the originator of images that had an almost universal
potency and a master of large-scale commissions that have left a
permanent mark on the cities in which they were located, died
Thursday at his home in Vence, France. He was 97 years old.
    During the second half of this century, Chagall had arrived at
something close to ubiquity.
    The first thing seen when one steps onto the piazza at Lincoln
Center in New York are the huge murals that he made for the
Metropolitan Opera in 1965. His ''Four Seasons'' mosaic for the First
National Bank in Chicago, his mosaics and tapestries for the Knesset
in Jerusalem, his ceiling painting for the Paris Opera, the museum of
his biblical paintings that bears his name in Nice, his stained-glass
windows for the United Nations headquarters in New York, the
cathedrals of Metz and of Rheims in France, the Fraumunster in Zurich
and the Hadassah Hebrew University in Jerusalem - all these have been
granted landmark status.
    If to them we add the paintings that can be found in almost every
museum in the developed world, the private commissions, the graphic
works that he produced by the hundreds, the stage designs and the
book illustrations that he never failed to produce on demand, it will
be clear that - at the very least - Marc Chagall left his mark on the
world.
    It should also be said that he had an enormous constituency - one
that overran all boundaries of age, creed, social status or place of
origin. Though he was not without his detractors, Chagall's sense of
fantasy, his habitually gorgeous color and his gift for an
immediately accessible poignancy won admirers wherever his work was
shown.
    His unconventional world was a brightly colored melange of animals,
flowers, people, embracing lovers, birds and fish playing musical
instruments, nymphs, satyrs, winged female figures, Jewish and
Christian symbols, vignettes of clustered roofs and violins with
angel's wings. These objects rarely if ever bore their natural hues;
cows were likely to be blue, horses green, people red.
    This fantasy universe, sometimes poignantly sad but more often
laughingly joyous, was childlike in its apparent simpleness yet
strangely sophisticated in its perceptiveness. It was, moreover, a
world without gravity, in which objects appeared to float in
disparate juxtaposition while achieving a remarkable total harmony
and rhythm.
    Chagall expressed his antic imaginings in oils, pastels,
watercolors, gouaches, lithographs, etchings, murals, glass, clay and
stone. ''I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment,'' he once
said.
    Marc Chagall was born Moyshe Shagal on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk,
Russia. Like many another city within the Russian Pale of Settlement,
Vitebsk had a large and self-contained Jewish population. Alike in
religious, social and cultural terms, they were a people set apart.
Religious festivals, fasts and dietary rules were strictly observed.
In their dress, likewise, Jews within the pale were unmistakable. Nor
were they allowed to travel without a permit.
    It was from this milieu, at once isolated and intensely alive, that
Marc Chagall drew not only his awareness of the injustices and
inequalities of human life but a vast repertory of symbol and
allusion, ritual and wry humor, aspiration and irrepressible feeling.
By the time he got to St. Petersburg as an art student in 1906 he had
the subject matter of a lifetime at his fingers' ends, and he was to
be sustained by it throughout the next eight decades.
    To get to St. Petersburg at all was difficult, in that no Jew from
the pale was allowed to settle there unless he was registered as a
domestic servant. Luckily for Chagall, there was in St. Petersburg a
moneyed Jewish community that did a great deal for the cultural life
of the city. Not only did a member of this enlightened group pretend
to the authorities that Chagall was in his service as a footman, but
it was thanks to another Jewish patron, Max Vinaver, that Chagall was
able in 1911 to go to study in Paris.
    Meanwhile, Chagall enrolled in 1906 in the Imperial School for the
Protection of New Art in St.Petersburg, which was run at that time by
Nicholas Roerich, now best known for having designed sets and
costumes for the first production of Stravinsky's ''Rite of Spring.''
Roerich was interested enough in the young Chagall to secure for him
exemption from military service and a small but indispensable
scholarship.
    In 1908 Chagall moved to the Zvantseva School, then co-directed by
Leon Bakst, soon to be famous the world over for his designs for
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, and by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, a stage
designer and book illustrator of high quality. It was above all
through Dobuzhinsky that Chagall came to know the avant-garde Russian
theater of the day, in which poets and painters were welcome to play
a part.
    In developing his abrupt, foreshortened, topsy-turvy form of
narrative art, Chagall owed much to the example not only of other
painters but of Meyerhold, Evreinov and other progressive theater
directors. Himself destined to do much of his best work for the
stage, Chagall grew up with theater all around him. (Even his future
wife, Bella Rosenfeld, was attending lectures by Konstantin
Stanislavsky when he first met her.)
    By 1910 Chagall at 22 had two paintings in an exhibition at the
offices of ''Apollon,'' a leading art magazine in St. Petersburg, and
in the fall of that year he asked Bakst if he could help to paint his
scenery for a Diaghilev ballet called ''Narcisse.'' But fundamentally
he was ready to take on a new challenge, and he persuaded his patron
to stake him to a first visit to Paris, where he arrived in 1911.
    Chagall in Paris had an almost instantaneous success. Mating his
exotic and deeply felt subject matter with the new modes of pictorial
structure that he learned in Paris (above all from Robert Delaunay),
he gave his autobiographical fantasies the status of epic. Paintings
like ''I and the Village'' of 1911, now in the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, had an imaginative power, a compositional virtuosity and
a firm basis in fact that caused widespread enthusiasm even in an era
of great painting.
    Before long, Chagall was taken up by Guillaume Apollinaire, the
foremost French poet of the day, and through him he came to know
Herwarth Walden - dealer, editor and artistic impresario - in Berlin,
thereby and in short order adding another capital city to his list of
conquests. It was another French poet, Blaise Cendrars, who completed
the cosmopoliten education of Marc Chagall and turned him into a
full-fledged member of the international avant-garde.
    By the summer of 1914, no more than seven years after his first
arrival in St. Petersburg as an unknown student, Chagall had painted
many of the pictures by which he is now best known, and had shown in
Paris, Berlin and Moscow under the best auspices. His imperious
imagination had cut through every pictorial convention, and he had
proved that a poet in paint could endure bad times and deal with bad
people and yet come through intact.
    In June 1914 he went back from Berlin to his native Vitebsk, where
his fiancee Bella Rosenberg was waiting for him. Caught in Russia by
the outbreak of World War I, he had no choice but to stay
indefinitely. He and Bella were married in 1915, thereby setting the
seal on what was already a love affair of legendary stature. Their
daughter Ida was born in 1916.
    The painter welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, not only
because it made him, as a Jew, a full citizen but also because it
recognized him as an artist. Indeed, he was made commissar for art in
Vitebsk, where he busily went about trying to make the average man
into a painter.
    His program of organizing art schools, a museum and exhibitions was
frustrated not by Communists in favor of traditional art styles but
by two avant-garde nonobjective artists, Malevich and Lissitzky. He
ultimately resigned his Vitebsk post and went to Moscow in 1920,
where he did the murals for the Kamerny State Jewish Theater and
designed sets and costumes for its productions.
    Affronted finally by the official avant-garde - Kandinsky, Rodchenko
and Malevich - that placed him in the poorly paid ''third class'' of
artists, Chagall left the Soviet Union in 1922 for Berlin and Paris.
Among the paintings he left behind were ''Over the Town'' and ''The
Wedding,'' which, along with other of his works, have been kept by
the Soviet government.
    In the West, he found himself famous but penniless - famous because
the paintings he had left in Berlin had been sold, penniless because
the million reichsmarks they had fetched were worthless in the
postwar inflation.
    Chagall, at 36, was welcomed as an idol by the Surrealists, who saw
their art's characteristics heralded in such prewar paintings as
''Paris Through the Window'' and in the artist's double-headed men,
in his dream imagery and in the daring way he juxtaposed animals and
men. ''With Chagall alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return
into modern painting,'' said Andre Breton, the theoretician of
Surrealism.
    In a strange act of obeisance, the Surrealists Max Ernst, Paul
Eluard and Gala (who became Salvador Dali's wife) implored Chagall on
their knees to avow Surrealism. ''I want an art of the earth,'' he
replied in refusing the homage, ''and not merely an art of the head.''
    But the paintings he produced - ''Bride and Groom with Eiffel
Tower,'' for instance - were denounced by most critics as travesties
of his once combative gifts. From this obloquy he was rescued by his
etchings.
    Fortuitously, Ambroise Vollard, the Paris art dealer, commissioned
the painter to illustrate Gogol's ''Dead Souls.'' For the task, he
was obliged to learn the art of etching, at which he proved
enormously adept. The whimsy of his illustrations was a great success
and led to a commission to do La Fontaine's ''Fables.'' His folksy
modern icons brought out the subtleties of the 17th-century tales and
underlined their Oriental origins. Again Chagall scored a triumph.
    His next commission was the Bible, for which he did 105 plates
between 1931 and 1956, when the edition was published.  These are
remarkable for their humanity - no figure wears a halo, for instance
- and for their preciseness of detail.
    When the Germans overran France in 1940-41, the artist was brought
to the United States by the Emergency Rescue Committee. He was in New
York for seven years, for most of them living in an apartment off
Fifth Avenue. He never quite became accustomed to the city, which he
called ''this Babylon,'' and he never mastered English.
    With Leonide Massine, the choreographer and a fellow Russian,
Chagall designed the costumes and sets for a Ballet Theater
production of ''Aleko'' and for ''The Firebird.'' Two of his
paintings in this period reflected his war-induced pessimism about
the world. ''Yellow Crucible,'' painted in 1943, portrays in yellows
and greens a burning Vitebsk, a sinking ship and a ladder being
raised to remove Jesus from the cross. The other, ''Falling Angel,''
depicts a world in violent disorder by showing a rabbi fleeing with
the Torah and a bleeding angel.
    Chagall was a slow workman. ''I could do 10 paintings a day, like
some of the others, if I wanted to,'' he said. ''But there's more to
it than that. A true work of art is a self-contained world, and the
world wasn't made in a day.''
    In 1944 Chagall's personal life was virtually shattered by the death
of his wife, who was his mentor and his guide, and for nine months he
refused to paint.
    ''All dressed in white or all in black, she has long floated across
my canvases, guiding my art,'' he said at the time. ''I finish
neither painting nor engraving without asking her 'yes or no.'''
    When the painter returned to France four years later, it was with
Virginia Haggard MacNeil, by whom he had a son, David. Mrs. MacNeil,
a Briton, left him after a while for an older man, a buffeting to
Chagall's ego that he took in injured silence. But he soon met
Valentine Brodsky, a divorced Russian, who became his second wife.
    Vava, as her husband nicknamed her, put order into his life and
served as a buffer against importunate art lovers. His studio,
though, she was never able to organize, for the artist insisted that
he thrived on clutter.
    There were racks of canvases, art books strewn about, uncleaned
palettes, photos of relatives and postcards pinned on the wall. A
samovar bubbled and a phonograph gave out classical music as he
toiled. It was his private world.
    From it came such paintings as ''The Lovers of Vence,'' a boy and a
girl tenderly embracing, with Vence in the background.
    As his wealth expanded, so did his living style. He had a house on
the fashionable Ile St. Louis in Paris and a large villa at Vence, on
the Riviera. In New York, he put up at the Essex House. Amid this
elegance, he was something of an oddity, for he habitually dressed in
baggy trousers and shapeless sweaters.
    Chagall gave off an air of meekness, which concealed a hardheaded
shrewdness about his own worth in the marketplace. What confused
those who dealt with him was his physical resemblance to one of his
own exotic images. In young adulthood, for instance, he looked like
Harpo Marx, with his puckish face, large eyes and crown of curls. In
old age, he seemed a winsome elf.
    In his last years, increasing celebrity attached to Chagall. The
Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris opened a room devoted to his
work. He was awarded the International Prize for Engraving at the
Venice Biennale. He did the stained glass windows for the church at
Assy, France, and the sets and costumes for ''Daphnis et Chloe'' for
the Paris Opera. He went on to design two new windows for the Metz
Cathedral and 12 for the synagogue of the Hadassah Hebrew University
Medical Center in Jerusalm.
    In the United States, his windows grace the United Nations and the
Union Church in Tarrytown, N.Y. His work in glass, which he learned
to stain in his 60's, outshines his paintings in the opinion of many
critics. For the artist it represented an absorption in religion,
which he had drifted away from in middle life.
    In one of his last thrusts in this direction, he designed a triptych
of Old Testament themes for the three huge Gobelins tapestries for
the Knesset, or Parliament, of Israel.
    With this work, as with his other art, Chagall considered himself a
rugged individual, serene in the belief that his creations would
outlive their critics.
    ''If I create with my heart, almost all my intentions remain,'' he
asserted. ''If it is with my head, almost nothing. An artist must not
fear to be himself, to express only himself. If he is absolutely and
entirely sincere, what he says and does will be acceptable to
others.''