Chagall: Love and Exile by Jackie Wullschlager

The scene captures to perfection the dichotomy of Chagall's life and fame — an artist who made a Sistine Chapel of his miserable home town, Vitebsk, putting fiddlers on the roof and a cubist form of ghetto life into the world's great galleries and collections. Chagall stayed true to his roots and clung to his first wife, Bella, as a memento of all that informed his art.

But the world that received him chose to ignore his subject matter and see only the vivid, bold and modern colours of his celestial city.

Jackie Wullschlager, art critic of the Financial Times, describes the gulf between man and rep-utation with admirable serenity. Vitebsk is brought to life as a place beyond the pale, which is to say that large and featureless stretch of Russia where Jews were officially allowed to live. Chagall's father lugged herring barrels for a living. He was his mother's favourite child (of nine), painted her in a famous childbirth scene and ascribed his "dreaminess" to her genes. Never much of a rebel, when she entered his studio to find him paint-ing a nude of his fiancée, Chagall shame-facedly turned the canvas to the wall.

He made his way to St Petersburg, where the decadent Diaghilev artists Bakst and Benois held sway, and it was only when he had sold a few works and begged a fare to Paris in 1911 from one of his collectors that he found his métier. At a squalid Montparnasse colony called La Ruche (the hive), where artists either starved to death or shot to fame, he worked night and day among such inter-national bohos as Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera, Jacques Lipschitz, Amadeo Mod-igliani and Chaim Soutine. The poet Blaise Cendrars became his avid publicist, along with Guillaume Apollinaire, who pronounced his work "surna-turel". It was the birth of surreal-ism. Back home to marry Bella in 1914, he was trapped by the war and put to work at the Ministry of Defence. When Revolution broke out he retreated to Vitebsk, only to be summoned by the Commissar for Education, Anatoly Luna-charsky, a fellow-struggler from La Ruche, and appointed head of visual arts for the Soviet Union.

Chagall declined, agreeing instead to open an art school in Vitebsk which, for the next four years, became a modernist paradise and battleground as Commissar Chagall, no politician, lost an agitprop war to comrades Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Before Lunacharsky let him leave the country, he painted breath-taking stage sets for the Yiddish theatre in Moscow, most of whose members would be murdered by Stalin.

Apart from research trips to Palestine to feed a Bible series, and refuge in America during the war, he spent the rest of his life in France amongst its artistic elite. "When Matisse dies," said Picasso, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is." But Chagall had a depth of field that ran beyond deep hues. His portrait of self and wife out for a walk, Bella holding his hand and flying through the air, is one of those moments when artistic realism meets chassidic mysticism, freeing the body from its earthly confines.

After Bella's death, he married twice more, once unhappily and again prag-matically. His second wife said he was not interested in her physically, and that may have been more metaphorical than she knew. Chagall was looking for something beyond flesh and blood. At his funeral, the request for a kaddish was refused but the journalist said it quietly over the grave. Sometimes it takes a humble jour-nalist to reveal the truth about art and few have done that better than Wullschlager in this monumental life.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is'. Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbors living in splendor on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival. Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive 'potato-colored' czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where 'you either died or came out famous'.Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Wullschlager has had exclusive access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished letters from the Chagall family collection in Paris, which are quoted here for the first time, lending Chagall's own unique voice to this account. Drawing also on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many also previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.