Winter has descended early on Paris, a leaden sky blocking out the sun, enclosing us in a world of damp and cold. A fine drizzle hangs in the air, sidewalks are gritty with rain and soot. This morning at my neighborhood outdoor market, the butcher told me he could smell snow in the air.
To escape the six months of cold and damp that have settled in, we Parisians have different options: a privileged few can head south to the Mediterranean; the rest of us root out winter coats and woolen scarves.
In my case, last Friday, dressed in a down jacket, umbrella in hand, I stepped outside, headed down a steep hill and walked to the eastern limit of my neighborhood, home to the new Paris Philharmonic, inaugurated in January 2015.
At first glance, this imposing structure hardly resembles a source of relief from gloom. Seen from afar, it looks like a giant, molten German steel helmet fallen from the sky. Up close, well, it still looks like a German steel helmet, but flocks of birds, some plunging, some swooping upwards, emerge from the façade. They are there, obviously, to symbolize music, but they remind me a bit of Hitchcock’s film “The Birds.”
Happily, hidden beneath this mass of metal, beneath the lip of an immense balcony at the level of the concert hall, there is an exhibition space and within that space, there is light, color, music, love and joy. In a word, there is Chagall.
From October 13 until January 31st, 2016, the Paris Philharmonic is presenting the exhibit “Marc Chagall, The Triumph of Music.”
Chagall, who lived to be 98, dying at the end of a normal workday spent in his studio, experienced the major upheavals and horrors of the 20th century. Born in 1887 in Vitebsk, a city in today’s Belarus and at that time a part of the Russian Empire, Chagall, raised in a family of Hassidic Jews, went on to become a citizen of the world.
He studied painting in Saint Petersburg, painted in Paris, Berlin, Mexico and New York, where he fled to escape Hitler’s persecution of Jews, and finally returned to Europe. In the South of France, he captured that region’s vibrant, radiant color in all his works: paintings, drawings, collages, book illustrations, costumes, stage settings, a painting for the foyer of the Frankfurt Opera, the ceiling of Opera Garnier in Paris, monumental panels for the Met in New York.
At the Philharmonic exhibit, the place of honor is given to Chagall’s work for the theater, beginning with the monumental ceiling he was commissioned to paint for the Paris Opera in 1963. This 220 m² circular work, which it took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete, is a celebration of operatic music, where figures of opera and ballet circle high above theater-goers’ heads.
At the exhibit, these figures are brought “down to our level” thanks to a projection created by the Google Cultural Institute in Paris. We can see the details of Chagall’s depiction of Carmen, the ballerinas of Swan Lake, or the painter himself, palette in hand, the maestro of this vast scenic opera.
Impressive as this projection may be, with its musical accompaniment corresponding to the details of the 14 operas and ballets Chagall represented, it is not nearly as interesting as the preparatory work on view.
In drawings, paintings and collages, we discover how Chagall worked: how he began with swatches of bright color, how figures and themes emerged, how affinities were created, and finally, how all the details of his composition resonate together. Through the shock of color and visual rhythm, this painter-composer builds a bridge between music, color and form.
We can also see Chagall at work, thank to Izis, a Franco-Lithuanian photographer who followed the unfolding of his work for the Paris and New York Operas. Crouched on his knees, brush in hand, how small the artist looks, yet at no time do we lose sight of the enormous creative vitality that inhabited Marc Chagall all his life.
The exhibit follows a reverse chronological order, beginning with the decors for the Paris and New York operas in the 1960’s, ending with the artist’s work for the Moscow State Jewish Theater soon after its creation in 1919. After discovering the monumental decors, we participate in the creation of the costumes and stage sets Chagall created for operas and ballets.
For a 1967 production of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Met, the costumes are wonderfully inventive, each one a work of art in itself, an integral part of the characters’ story, a complement to their voice and song. And once again, we get to see preparatory sketches to better understand how Chagall’s work emerged.
We can also view black-and-white videos of the 1967 production. In this case, the absence of color brought home to me the artist’s brilliant capacity to merge with Mozart’s music and totally inhabit the theater with his work.
From the start, in all media, music triumphs in Marc Chagall’s creations. We see this in his settings and costumes for Stravinsky’s “Firebird” at the Met in 1945 or for the ballet “Aleko,” based on the music of Tchaikovsky, which premiered in Mexico City in 1942. Of the stage settings for this production, Chagall’s wife Bella wrote, “Chagall’s decors burn like the sun in the heavens.”
In the panels he painted in 1920 for the Moscow State Jewish Theater, Chagall melds tradition and the avant-garde, celebrating the joy of the Hassidic music and dance of his youth while using cubist forms and experimenting with color.
I first discovered Chagall’s work as an adolescent, in all places, on the street where I lived. Our neighbor was Mr. Sol Wolf, an avid collector of modern Jewish art, with a fine collection in his home. Mr. Wolf and his wife Dorothy took me to art exhibits, lent me art books and introduced me to the enormous pleasure of enjoying art at home. They also introduced me to Chagall.
At the Philharmonic, I discovered him as never before, an artist full of life, love and joy, whose work blazes even on the darkest of Parisian days.
