Word: vitebsk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...dancing, the common, ordinary concerns of the village, all contain divine sparks that, if allowed to shine through, bring man into harmony with his fellow man and with God. Chagall is not consciously spreading Hasidism. But he imbibed it to his very core when he was a boy in Vitebsk, and has been giving it forth ever since...
Patriotic Bunting. Chagall continued back to Vitebsk from Berlin, then war broke out leaving his work cached in Paris and Berlin. Once home, he married his childhood sweetheart, the darkly sensual Bella Rosenfeld, Moscow-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant. It was the great love of his life, and he celebrated it in his exuberant 1918 Double Portrait with a Wineglass, in which a violet-stockinged Bella holds the artist up in the air, lifting him joyously above the streets, while an angel representing their daughter Ida hovers overhead...
...that same year, Chagall was made commissioner of fine arts in Vitebsk by the newly formed Soviet government, and as a commissar he rapidly demonstrated that he was a divine idiot. He called for "revolutionary painters" and peppered the local party press with commissarty exhortations. His vision of the revolution was to make "ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator." Imagining that all the house painters of his native town were repressed artists, he spurred them on to decorating its drab buildings with folk imagery. When his superiors arrived from Moscow to find the walls covered...
...Soviet critics, too, were soon after Chagall's hide, dubbing his misbegotten revolution in art a "mystic and formalistic bacchanal." But the purge came from the quarter he least expected. He had hired two painters, Malevich and Lissitzky, members of the suprematist school of painting, to teach in Vitebsk's Free Academy. One day he returned from Moscow to find that they had taken over the school, and based its new curriculum on their brand of geometrical abstraction and pure objectivity...
...Chagall could not long escape into the world of theater and ballet. The disasters of war inflamed him, and in 1943 he painted the Yellow Crucifixion. Amidst acidic yellows and greens, Vitebsk burns, a ship sinks, a ladder is half-posed to remove Christ from the Cross. In his Falling Angel, begun in 1923 and not finished until 1947, the whole world violently disintegrates, with a rabbi fleeing with the Torah and an angel hemorrhaging down through a tempest-torn...