Chagall, Wullschlager, Jackie

Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive potato-colored tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and L ger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where one either died or came out famous. But turmoil lay ahead--war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.

His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists--the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagalls passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.

Wullschlager explores in detail Chagalls complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as Andr Breton put it, under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting, and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagalls work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life--ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.