Marc Chagall on Art and Culture

by Benjamin Harshav

Overview

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall's life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall's work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804748315
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	07/02/2003
Series:	Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences
Edition description:	1
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Benjamin Harshav is Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Among his many books is Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford, 1999). Barbara Harshav is Lecturer in the department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has translated into English over 20 books of fiction and nonfiction in French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish, including The Labor of Life: Selected Plays by Hanoch Levin (Stanford 2003).

Table of Contents

	Preface	xi
	Introduction: The Texts of a Multicultural Artist	1
	An Outline of Chagall's Life	3
	The Modern Jewish Revolution	17
	Questions of Identity	22
1.	In Revolutionary Russia: 1918-1922	27
	Art on the Anniversary of October: November 7, 1918	28
	The Revolution in Art: March-April 1919	30
	My Work in the Moscow Yiddish Chamber Theater: 1921-1928	33
	On Jewish Art--Leaves from My Notebook: 1922	38
2.	In Paris Between the World Wars: 1923-1941	41
	How I Got to Know Peretz: 1925	41
	On Modern Art: 1931	43
	With Bialik in Eretz-Israel: 1934	51
	On a Jewish Art Museum: 1929, 1935	54
	Speech at the World Conference of the Yiddish Scientific Institute: 1935	56
	Artists and Jewish Artists: April 10, 1939	60
3.	World War II and the Holocaust: 1941-1950	65
	Some Impressions Regarding French Painting: 1943, 1946	65
	James Johnson Sweeney: An Interview with Marc Chagall: 1944	79
	Unity--Symbol of Our Salvation: February 1944	87
	To My City Vitebsk: February 1944	91
	Two Kinds of Art-Poetry: April 30, 1944	93
	To the Paris Artists: December 1944	101
	The End of the War: May 1945	102
	To the Jewish People in Paris: June 1946	104
	"Comfort Ye My People...": July 1946	105
	Art After the Holocaust: July-August 1947	108
	For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950	113
4.	Revival: 1951-1960	117
	Words in Jerusalem: June 1951	117
	To Israel: July 19, 1951	119
	Farewell to Israel: July 20, 1951	121
	A. Sutzkever--Poet and Symbol: 1950, 1955	123
	Art and Life: March 1958	126
	The Erasmus Prize: 1960	138
5.	Beyond Painting: 1952-1966	143
	On Ceramics: 1952	143
	On Engraving and Lithography: 1960	144
	The Stained Glass Windows in Jerusalem: 1962	145
	The Crisis of Color: 1963	147
	The Ceiling of the Paris Opera: 1964	151
	The Circus: 1966	152
6.	The Last Years: 1967-1985	155
	Dialogue in the Louvre with Pierre Schneider: 1967	155
	On the First Day of the Six-Day War: 1967	168
	Our Streets of Vitebsk and Vilna: 1967, 1969	169
	About the Yiddish Poet Elkhonen Vogler	170
	On the Death of Elkhonen Vogler	170
	The Tapestries in the Knesset in Jerusalem: August 1969	171
	The Biblical Message: 1973	172
7.	The First Book on Marc Chagall: 1918	175
	A. Efros and Ya. Tugendhold: The Art of Marc Chagall	175
	Abram Efros: The Emperor's Clothes	176
	Ya. Tugendhold: The Artist Marc Chagall	178
	Abram Efros: Chagall	188
I.	The Nature of His Art	188
II.	The Palette. Graphics	198
	Notes	205
	Index	221

Editorial Reviews

"[Marc Chagall on Art and Culture and Marc Chagall and His Times] represent important contributions to the fields of art history, twentieth-century history, and Russian studies, and Marc Chagall and His Times in particular will, I suspect, be a standard work for those studying Chagall's life for years to come."—Canadian Journal of History/ Annales canadiennes of d'histoire

From the Publisher

Harshav (Hebrew & comparative literature, Yale) presents two volumes concerning the life and times of Russian painter Marc Chagall (1877-1985). Many of the books on Chagall focus, of course, on the art itself while offering a limited scope of the artist. Harshav's documentary texts will fill a void in the study of the artist and provide a comprehensive anchor for more all-encompassing research in the future, as Chagall's written legacy is mostly unknown. The more substantial volume, Marc Chagall and His Times, focuses on autobiographical writings, some correspondence, and a narrative outline of his life. Chagall had a zest for living, and the family photos, reproductions of lesser-known works, and other documents from his life dovetail with the turbulent times of the 20th century and illustrate the impact of life on art. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, due out earlier but more appropriate as a companion to the later volume, covers public statements, lectures, essays, and interviews. The reader wrestles, along with Chagall, over matters of Jewish identity, the Russian Revolution, Surrealism, and communism. These two volumes would have worked better as one, or at least should have been published at the same time, as readers will typically need both. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture depends on information obtained from the documentary biography and may indeed confuse readers with limited background on the artist. However, the information presented in both will be invaluable to students, researchers, professionals, and aficionados alike, and both are recommended for libraries specializing in art history or Hebrew studies; just remember to purchase the second book in October!-Nadine Speidel, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"[Marc Chagall on Art and Culture and Marc Chagall and His Times] represent important contributions to the fields of art history, twentieth-century history, and Russian studies, and Marc Chagall and His Times in particular will, I suspect, be a standard work for those studying Chagall's life for years to come."

Canadian Journal of History/ Annales canadiennes of d'histoire