Marc Chagall on Art and Culture

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall’s public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in twentieth-century art. It reveals the travails and achievements of his life as a Jew in the twentieth century and his perennial concerns with Jewish identity and destiny, Yiddish literature, and the state of Israel. This collection includes annotations and introductions of the Chagall texts by the renowned scholar Benjamin Harshav that elucidate the texts and convey the changing cultural contexts of Chagall’s life. Also featured is the translation by Benjamin and Barbara Harshav of the first book about Chagall’s work, the 1918 Russian The Art of Marc Chagall.

Library Journal

Harshav (Hebrew & comparative literature, Yale) presents two volumes concerning the life and times of Russian painter Marc Chagall (1877-1985). Many of the books on Chagall focus, of course, on the art itself while offering a limited scope of the artist. Harshav's documentary texts will fill a void in the study of the artist and provide a comprehensive anchor for more all-encompassing research in the future, as Chagall's written legacy is mostly unknown. The more substantial volume, Marc Chagall and His Times, focuses on autobiographical writings, some correspondence, and a narrative outline of his life. Chagall had a zest for living, and the family photos, reproductions of lesser-known works, and other documents from his life dovetail with the turbulent times of the 20th century and illustrate the impact of life on art. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, due out earlier but more appropriate as a companion to the later volume, covers public statements, lectures, essays, and interviews. The reader wrestles, along with Chagall, over matters of Jewish identity, the Russian Revolution, Surrealism, and communism. These two volumes would have worked better as one, or at least should have been published at the same time, as readers will typically need both. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture depends on information obtained from the documentary biography and may indeed confuse readers with limited background on the artist. However, the information presented in both will be invaluable to students, researchers, professionals, and aficionados alike, and both are recommended for libraries specializing in art history or Hebrew studies; just remember to purchase the second book in October!-Nadine Speidel, Cuyahoga Cty. P.L., Parma, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Benjamin Harshav is Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Yale University. Among his many books is Language in Time of Revolution (Stanford, 1999). Barbara Harshav is Lecturer in the department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. She has translated into English over 20 books of fiction and nonfiction in French, German, Hebrew and Yiddish, including The Labor of Life: Selected Plays by Hanoch Levin (Stanford 2003).