|
|
Article: Painter of a lost world.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- February 27, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Chagall
A Biography
Jackie Wullschlager
Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 582 pp.
"If I were not a Jew ... I wouldn't have been an artist, or I would be a different artist altogether," Russian-born painter Marc Chagall once declared. It was a paradoxical statement, because Judaism, with its prohibitions against image worship, has no sustained tradition of figurative art. Chagall recalled that, growing up in the isolated Russian town of Vitebsk during the late 1800s, he "never had a single picture, print, or reproduction. ... I never had occasion to see, in Vitebsk, such a thing as a drawing." But it was this upbringing in an introverted Hasidic ...