Luminous "..Illumination"

I have just this minute finished "Everything is Illuminated," the first novel of the wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer. Like Primo Levi's "Survival in Auschwitz," "Everything..." astonishes me, leaves me speechless, makes me want to write, makes me want to scream. His "remembrances" of the shtetl, inventing memories of life for Jewish villagers in the late 1700's, are fascinating and complex little creations. In some ways, I felt like Foer wrote my novel - the novel I should have written in any account - so my work is done on this planet.

This is not to say the novel is perfect - it has traces of the amateur in a few passages (but who am I to judge really?). I cannot imagine his grandmother is tremendously happy about his quasi-biographical vignettes, which needless to say reflect if not poorly then strangely on him and his family. The fascination with sex, particularly juvenile sex, and love, or lack thereof, is nothing new and not particularly impressive. There are the lengthy run-on paragraphs with no apparent purpose that leave you bored yet ashamed of yourself for not being post-modern enough to enjoy the rants (a la Joyce's "Ulysses"). And of course, like any pantheon-geared recently written novel, there is irreverent and irrelevant phrasing with odd punctuation and bizarre formatting (see "Infinite Jest" and the like).

But the sheer unmitigated brilliance of luminous sections involving the War (the one that ended and began humanity all at once), the laugh-out-loud jokes about Jewishness ("The Eskimos have four hundred words for snow and the Jews have four hundred words for shmuck"), and the "sublimely butchered" English of the Ukranian translator, Alex, make all suffering dissolve on contact. This is genius. Pure, liquid genius.

"Everything is Illuminated" uses a lot of old tricks - like story within a story within a story and stream of consciousness voicing - but in new ways that ultimately work. And that really is the point of a good novel right? Stories should work for us - use our time well and add something to our drab existences. Jonathon Safran Foer, in his delicate and worthy tale, entertains in the moment and gives the reader a sliver of dimension for use in perpetuity.

Marc Chagall at SFMoMA

Last week I was in San Francisco and stopped in at SFMoMA (to which New York is eternally grateful for its recent generous contribution to The Whitney) for the Chagall retrospective. Although I have never been much of a devotee of Chagall, this exhibit makes a very persuasive case for developing one's devotion. I had always been put off by the wild colors and deceptively childish illustrations. Only a few paintings into the exhibit, I began to think of Chagall as the intellectual's artist - in virtually every painting he provides some deeply symbolic puzzle for the viewer's delectation. In painting after painting, I found myself both awed by the spiritual beauty of the piece and intrigued by the mysteries of its suggestions.

Vitebsk

The first few paintings are from Chagall's first stint in Paris, from before the first World War. They hearken, as many of his successive paintings would, back to Vitebsk and the memory of the shtetl. Le Juif Rouge (1915) depicts a familiar Chagall character, the old man in the shtetl. Chagall splays Hebrew writing across the sky like a rising sun yet the old man is almost a caricature, with his paralyzed eye, red beard (of the infamous Red-Haired Jews), bent posture, and green hand. The vaulting background architecture, indicating reverence, juxtaposed with the somewhat negative rendering of the subject, creates a contrast that surfaces repeatedly in Chagall's work. Both pain and joy appear in his memory paintings - The Wedding (1910) is a clear celebration using Chagall's vibrant color scheme, though it is unclear here if he is referencing a Russian wedding (the groom is in a top hat and the letters above the door are Cyrillic). Le Poete aux Oiseaux (1911) is a peaceful pastoral scene, almost Rococo in its innocence. L'Homme dans la Niege (1913) is more garish in its coloration and the subject, the man in the snow, appears to have been attacked. Later paintings involving the shtetl, such as the ghost town of Souvenir (1925) and topsy turvy realm of Les Maisonettes Rouges (1922) are also of seemingly mixed feelings.

The Avant Garde

This exhibit also emphasizes the connection to Cubism and other movements afoot in Europe at the time. In Temptation (1912), we see the inkling of his coloration and shadowed edges, even some of his totemism (a deer with bird perched atop antlers nestles in the right lower corner) and decorative borders (like a Ketubah), but the painting is more of an exploration of Dynamism and Cubism than anything we think of as Chagall. L'Apparition (1917-18) is similar in this regard and but greatly emphasizes the notion of receiving inspiration from God or one of his messengers (note that the angel is male). He also breaks with contemporaneous painting, and Judaism as well, even as he pays homage, by depicting a monumental crucifixion via Cubist planes in Golgothe (1912). Standing in front of this work, I immediately got it viscerally because of the deep reds and greens and the hollowed out eyes but was left with many questions about the meaning behind the imagery choices - this does not generally happen for me (and I would suspect most people) with the innumerable Picasso or Braque pieces in this vein.

L'Acrobat (1914) is a lovely piece with the look of one of Picasso's Rose Period Harlequins combined with the heavy outlining of one of Max Beckmann's triptychs. The female acrobat has a lithe lizard-like shape and a hoop encircles her - perhaps an enshrinement of Chagall's love of the theatre and other forms of public performance. In Presentation (1912-13) and other works on paper from this period, Chagall makes an interesting joke with the headless ingénue - perhaps expressing the feeling he had as a small-town Russian Jew trying to make his entrée into the art world of Paris. Dabbling more in the surreal is Rabbi au Citron (1914) - I believe he is referring to the traditional feast of Sukkoth, where a citrus fruit (the lemon in the rabbi's left hand) and various tree branches (held in his right) are waved in the four cardinal directions to show that God is everywhere. But the rabbi perched aloft is turned in the opposite direction as the fruit-bearing rabbi, either reiterating the ubiquitous God theme or questioning the rabbi's convictions or both.

Bella

An entire room is devoted to the paintings that center around Chagall's wife and muse, Bella. What I found interesting about Promenade (1917-18) and Bella in Flight was the distancing or aloofness of the Bella figure. It is as if the artist does not want us to engage with her - he has put her there as a form of worship or sanctification but not to interact or communicate with the viewer. Prominent here also is the idea of flight representing love and/or freedom - but why is the artist grounded and beaming generously while Bella, ephemeral and pacific, is floating away?

The Jewish Theatre in Moscow

In the early 20's Chagall went to Moscow and started work on panels for the Jewish Theater there. These panels are strikingly different from work he did for other performing arts spaces, such as the L'Opera Garnier. The panels are both solemn and exuberant perhaps to display the varying emotional aspects of Yiddish culture. According to the monograph on this exhibit, "What, then, is Chagall declaring in this manifesto-like decorative cycle? Above all, his work for the Jewish Theater reveals an interest in visually interweaving spirituality, Jewish cultural life and folklore, and a dialogue with avant-garde art movements." The room in the exhibit filled with his panels and preparatory work for the theatre clearly reveals all of these impulses. The panels devoted to the arts (Four Corners of the Arts (1920)), show the flowering of these diverse cultural traits - dancing with abandon, calligraphy in scribing the Torah, and the enlightened fun of Yiddish plays. The panel on literature, where the cow brays Chagall's name in Hebrew letters, in particular focuses on the problematic hiddur mitzvah - or beautifying a commandment - of art. While comparing his own work to that of a Torah scribe (in so far as paintings are spiritual or represent teachings from the scriptures), he implicitly recognizes the difficulty of creating graven images.

Return to France and Beyond

After Chagall realized the limitations on an artist living in post-Revolution Russia, he returned once again to France. Many of those immediate post-Soviet paintings are much less aggressive - full of still-lifes (like Les Fleurs sur une Chaise, Mourillon (1926)) and gentle landscapes (like Le Paysage de L'Isle Adam 1925). But even in Nu sous la Table (1927-28), we see a totemistic tiny nude in the bottom right-hand corner.

During the depression and World War II, Chagall returns to his "wild" style with bravado, synthesizing elements of Jewish tradition with Christian imagery, as in the trio of panels, Resistance (1937-48), Resurrection (1937-48) and Liberation (1937-53). After all the critical thinking spent on earlier panels, my mind went into a swoon of sorts - I felt like I couldn't (or didn't want to) digest the symbolism and layers of these paintings (though again I felt like I was getting them on a more visceral level). In Le Crucifixion Blanche (1938), we see Christ wrapped in a prayer shawl, with a shaft of light illuminating both him and the tumult of shtetl Jews fleeing persecution (under the programs and anti-Semitism flaring across Europe). Despite the purity and blandness of most of the colors in this piece, the arrangement and subject matter scream at the viewer - this is a work of great pathos, of anguish and even fury. The Angel has similar motifs, but here the emotive nature of the colors is more overt - a red angel is falling, splitting the canvas in a diagonal transverse. Chagall's work during and briefly after the war uses Christ specifically to comment on the suffering and martyrdom of the Jewish people in Europe - his canvases are both catharsis and testimony.

The great breadth of the show, moving from his first years in Paris to his last canvases, wholly embracing a biblical cycle, in the 60's, makes even the most critical eye sympathetic to Chagall. I saw that Chagall was so much more than "I and the Village," more than pink and purple hues with happy couples and the frolicking cows. Chagall offers the viewer both the deepest of emotional and spiritual experiences as well as allegorical and symbolic labyrinths in which to lose oneself. Next, Philip Guston.