The Blue House of Marc Chagall

Polyhedral, the tumble-down logs running vertical, horizontal, higgle-piggledy, the blue house looms as large as a temple, filling the right foreground of the painting. In the distance is a fantasy village of minarets and castles, the ancient city of Vitebsk where Marc Chagall, who came into the world as Moishe Shagal, grew up.

The windows in the house are open, containing the same freakish mix of rectangles, trapezoids, and squares. The door is ajar; there is a figure just inside, half-hidden, crouched over something, perhaps a cooking pot. On the threshold other half-bent figures hover, cast in lumpy shadows upon the mustard-colored ground. The scene, whispering of poverty and privation, evokes Chagall’s own childhood as the eldest of seven surviving children, his father struggling to eke out 20 roubles a month hawking herring, his mother selling dry goods from the family's home. It is a world in which Jewish children are not allowed to attend Russian schools or universities, a time when Jewish boys might be conscripted into the Czar’s army or killed in a pogrom. And yet the scene is without menace, as if the boy Moishe Shagal were stationing himself in that house and saying, Even though life is hard, there is radiance and magic, and that radiance and magic can never be stolen from me.

“La Maison Bleue,” was painted outside in a single sitting in the summer of 1917. Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld had escaped from the tumult of St. Petersburg, recently renamed Petrograd, to the countryside around Vitesbsk. Months earlier, after a minister from Kerensky’s provisional government had resigned, Chagall had written to his father: “the country is heading for a general slaughter, famine, the collapse of the front, where half the soldiers will perish…mobs will roam the countryside with rifles…I will not live to see it, and I hope neither will you…”

But Moishe Shagal, or Mark Zakharovich Shagalov as he was known to Russian officials, would live to escape not just the Bolshevist Revolution of October 1917, the burning of Vitebsk, the depressions of Europe, but also the rounding up of Jews in Vichy France, the gas chambers of Dachau and Auschwitz and Treblinka.

I remember the first time I saw a Chagall painting—in the Museum of Modern Art as a student at Sarah Lawrence College, back in the middle seventies. I was young and earnest then, and had long conversations with my then-boyfriend, George, about the meaning of Chagall’s work. There were several Chagalls hanging among Monet’s Water Lillies and Andy Warhol’s Soup Cans, but the work that captivated me was called, “I and the Village.” Why is the cow’s head transposed to look like a woman’s face, I wondered. Why is a female figure milking the cow inside the cow’s head? Why is the couple in the distance upside-down? Why do noses look like moons and moons like noses? “I and the Village,” seemed to be rendered in another language, and I wanted to translate it, find the hidden correlate between symbol and sense, metaphor and meaning.

Time passed, bringing the usual up-endings. I left the home I shared with George and began a life with Len, whose imagination and life experience seemed as crowded and surrealistic as a Chagall canvas. Born a Jew but recently baptized a Catholic, Len held degrees in medicine and philosophy. He had been analyzed by Eric Fromm, and was working on a multi-volume study in philosophy which would unify the languages of art and science. I believed that he was the glass through which I would finally see the universe clearly.

I followed him through all the museums of New York, and some years later, when he was awarded a teaching post at the University of Leuven in Belgium, through the Musees Royaux des Beaux-Art in Bruxelles, the Louvre and the Centres Pompidou in Paris, through the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

We bought EuroRail passes and rode trains from one European capital to another, tracking down Chagalls, Breughals, Memlings, Della Robbias and Michelangelos. We played games of chess speeding through the Ardennes, through fields of lavender in the south of France, through vineyards outside Siena and Gubbio. In Vienna, we visited the homes of Ludwig van Beethoven, and in Munich, we took a suburban train thirty minutes from the city center to a village called Dachau.

Dachau. One of the most heinous of all the concentration camps and yet it had been so scrubbed and sanitized that it had become harmless, historically inconsequential. It reminded me of one of the civilian conservation camps created by Roosevelt in the 1930s. There were rows of new pine-planked bunks and neatly piled army regulation blankets and bare, pillowcase-less lozenges with gray-and-white-striped ticking. Prison uniforms hung upon hooks. There were tin cups, plates, knives and forks. Everything was suffused with an outdoorsy, summer-campy air, as if the Germans had merely been treating the Jews to a crash course in rural education.

But what shocked me most was not to be found in any cordoned-off display or carefully recreated diorama or series of black-and-white photographs in the museum. As the morning rain and fog gave way to the palest flags of noontime sunshine, groups of German schoolchildren gathered at outdoor picnic tables and opened up thermoses full of tea and coffee, taking out sandwiches and munching on potato crisps.

“Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.” The quote was from Marc Chagall and I stumbled across it many years after that day at Dachau. It was a wintry morning at the end of March 1985, just three months after Len’s passing, and I was a long way from accepting that I would never see him again. I couldn’t read newspapers or magazines; the goings-on of the world seemed trivial, made me vaguely angry. And yet there was an old man with merry eyes and a shock of white hair on the front page of "The New York Times," living and dying in a French village called Saint-Paul, leaving this world just three years shy of his hundredth birthday.

I turned the pages of the newspaper, inhaling the details of Moishe Shagal’s long life. Born in what is now Belarus, Chagall had lived in Paris, in Berlin, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, in Manhattan, finally returning to France, the country that had given him his name and artistic start. Chagall had taken up new addresses, the obituary writer said, the way Picasso took up mistresses, drifting across continents and capitals, searching for a place to call home. The Stalinist government had repudiated him; the Nazis had called him degenerate; a handful of art critics in America had called him derivative. Still, he keep painting, stopping only for a few months after his first wife, Bella, died.

Twenty-six years after that end-of-March day in 1985, my dreams haunted by the fading faces of the dead, my footsteps as uncertain as the upside-down girl in "I and the Village," I turn on my laptop computer every morning to glimpse "La Maison Bleue" which covers my screen.

Its radiance fills me like prayer.
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