Musical Images as a Reflection of the Artistic Universalism of Marc Chagall
73
Chagall’s violinists possess the art of levitation and easily “hang”
above the roofs of the houses, devotedly rocketing to the moon and clouds
- sometimes together with their chair - as in Blue Violinist, or perched on the
foundations of world turned upside-down, as in A Violinist and an Inverted
World. In the sky, birds - the most creative and sweet-voiced representatives
of the natural world - become the musicians’ companions. Olga Burenina
associates the effect of the “floating body” with the development of new
forms of artistic vision at the beginning of the 20
th
century, connected with
polymodality and paradoxiality of perception.
Viewing the image of the
violinist raised into the sky from the panel picture, she observes that music,
penetrating into space,
Fig. 3. A Blue Violinist, 1947
Fig. 4. A Violinist and an Inverted World, 1929
Fig. 5. A Street Violinist, 1911-1914. Oil
on canvas, 94.5/69.5 cm. Dusseldorf,
North Rhine-Westphalian Art Collection
Fig. 6. A Violinist and a Cock, 1982.
Paper, Lithography, 66/50 cm. Nice,
National Museum of Marc Chagall
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L. G. Safiullina, G. I. Batyrshina
74
“deprives the habitual form of the classical
determinacy and turns one
object into another. As a result, ... the violinist’s body, vertically hanging in
the air ... becomes fluid, weakly structured, deprived of not only prominent
organs (head, hands, legs), but gender differentiation ... [The] flying person
bears similarity both with caterpillar and with cocoon woven from finest
fibre.”
22
Levitating on high (A Bride with Blue Face, fig. 7) or floating in the air,
as if jumping (
A Painter and His Bride), violinists wrap the enamoured lovers
with tender musical covers, “repeating” their harmonic relations and motifs,
“joining” two halves - male and female - into a single unity. The semantics
of musicians’ flight in Chagall’s art is connected with the ability of art to
endow the feeling of freedom, delight and happiness, to direct us towards
beauty and reveal the angelical, the divine in a person.
The position in which the violin is held in Chagall’s canvases is
schematized, conveying the playing style of folk performers rather than
academic string players. The side of the cheek or the front of the shoulder
is used as a support, which does not happen in professional classical
performance, but is typical of street musicians. Sometimes Chagall’s
violinist lowers the instrument down to his torso, inverting it and playing it
like a small cello (a technique sometimes practiced by village violinists, a
distant likeness of which can be seen in ancient viol playing). Sometimes the
22
Burenina 2004.
Fig. 7. A Bride with Blue Face, 1932. Oil on
canvas, 100 х 81 cm. Private
collection
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Musical Images as a Reflection of the Artistic Universalism of Marc Chagall
75
instrument simultaneously represents the performer’s hand, as in
Blue
Violinist (
fig. 3). The violin is frequently kept at arm’s length, as in the
picture Circus Maximus (1968, fig. 8), where the actress, placed in the
foreground on the back of giant animal with a bird’s head, demonstrates her
vaulting skills.
Sometimes the painter uses mirror images, placing the violin on the
musician’s right side (even left-handed violinists hold the instrument in their
left hand) or painting his fingers on the wrong side of fingerboard, above
the strings, which would make it impossible to play the instrument. These
kinds of “spoonerisms” can also be observed in Chagall’s self-portraits,
when the painter’s palette and brush change places with each other. Often,
Chagall’s violinists use all 5 fingers of the left hand to perform, despite the
fact that the thumb is not used for playing, being needed as a
counterbalance on the other side of the instrument’s neck. The bow is
occasionally depicted in an arched form, similar to a horn, or turns into a
“peak,” disproportionally short or wide for the depicted instrument. The
way the bow is held is also indicative; it resembles the way a paintbrush is
held, when support is shifted from the forefinger. This speaks of the fact
that Chagall does not strive for documental precision in the musician’s pose
or the position of his hands: the most important thing for the artist is to
reconstruct the essence of the creative act, to accentuate its spiritual
meaning. It is also important that the violinist’s image in Chagall’s creativity
is presented by the painter as a creative artist - by himself, using the violin in
the same Chagall uses his working instruments, the palette and the brush.
23
The violinist’s image also appears in Chagall’s graphic works. The pen
drawing The Violinist at Night (1939, fig. 9) presents a half-length semi-
section shaped performer, inspired by music, accompanied by the figure of
naked girl and a sketch of a goat - a visualization of the klezmer’s thoughts
about his beloved (muse) and faithful friend (companion). The gouache
drawing A Violinist (1926-1927, fig. 10) has a satirical orientation: it shows a
tipsy musician who has disturbed the district with his fiddling. The woman
behind the fence looks at the peace-breaker disapprovingly and throws up
23
Natalya Apchinskaya suggests that Chagall identified himself with a musician only in his
later period of creativity: “The painter in Chagall’s later works is frequently identified not
with the poet, as it was in 1910, but with the musician, possibly, because music
presupposes an address not only to the individuum, but also to the masses; it met the
‘missionary’ orientation of the master’s creativity in that period, clearly demonstrating the
ability of art to unite people” (Apchinskaya 1995, p. 163). Evidence for this is provided in
one of the lithographies to the book Fairy Show and Kingdom (1972) by Kamil Burnikel, in
which the painter depicts himself as a winged band-master, floating above the orchestra
and the whole earth. However, as follows from the analysis of previous works, Chagall, due
to universality of his creative thinking, had compared himself to musicians before.
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