Chagall, with the proper respect

 

Holy crap, that Chagall guy is a helluva painter!

Last time we talked about the Chagall Museum, right up near the end of last year, we gave the whole story; the way the museum works, the pleasant little walk there from our apartment, a bit of its history, its lovely garden cafe. Then with a little AI flummery I put myself in some of his paintings for fun, and with that another day at clerkmanifesto was taken care of. 

But with a "Free first Sunday of the Month" and a new show they had up at the local Chagall Museum, we went for another visit, and, well, check out my opening sentence. So I thought I'd take a more Chagall centric approach to this visit.

That said the first thing we did after going into the Chagall Museum was to go to the garden cafe. I love their garden cafe. My town has brilliant street cafes and even beach cafes, but is a bit lacking in its garden cafes.

I had a spritz.

After going through the security into the museum proper, we eschewed the permanent collection of biblical paintings. Brilliant as they are we have now seen them a few times, and we were excited about new stuff. 

The new stuff was work and preparatory work toward a production of a ballet of "The Firebird" in New York in the forties, around where he was living during the war. And then there was another smaller room showing his work for the ceiling of the Paris Opera, maybe from the sixties? I'd really like to get up to Paris to see that ceiling!

Picasso said of Chagall "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." It's a pretty nice compliment. Funnily enough up the street from the Chagall Museum is the Matisse Museum! And even more funny, I saw this same quote featured in the Firebird show, only in the Chagall Museum, the Matisse part was omitted! It said "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." Ha!

Either way, Picasso might have been right. Although I don't know who all the other painters were in the world in order to go that big. Wasn't Rothko alive? He might have had an inkling about what color really is.

But all that nonsense aside, the colors in these Chagalls are crazy good, with that curious quality in all great painting of magic, not flying goats magic, but magic leaving one wondering how strong colors like that could possibly work so clearly and richly together and alone! And yet, in this Firebird show I equally enjoyed something about Chagall's crazy drawing fecundity. I wish I could draw like that, that is, kind of terribly, but have it always work perfectly. He has all these mad lines like he can't decide on one, and he's not afraid of ridiculous cartoonishness of hands and feet and faces, but again, it weirdly comes together. Wasn't all this the stuff they warned me in art school drawing classes that we should never do?

Chagall had a pretty funny quote about Picasso. He said "What a genius that Picasso. It's a pity he doesn't paint." I like that quote. I too wish Picasso painted a bit more, you know, stuff. But what can you do, somewhere in the middle of that century painting started coming apart and it was so great at first, but then maybe it was impossible to put it back together again.

Anyway, I took a bunch of pictures of some Chagall Firebird works and, well, no reason to do anything to them but show you and let you have your own reaction. Here they are: