Post No. 3 - The School of Yehuda Pen - Marc Chagall
“the whole Chagallian eroticism of powdered rococo.”
On the subject of Post No.1 - The School of Yehuda Pen - Vitebsk and Post No. 2 - The School of Yehuda Pen - Yudel Pen.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini - Aeneas, Anchises, and Ascanius (1619)
Bernini chiseled this sculpture out of stone when he was 21 years old.
How don't they have a fence around the masterpiece? All the plebeians can’t resist from touching the baby's bottom.
This was his first big commission, so Bernini went all out to show what his genius can do. Three sculptures merged into one composition. The idea is unbelievably ambitions. And you can see how he grew in the subsequent commissions.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini - Rape of Proserpina (1621–22)
Bernini chiseled this sculpture out of stone when he was 23 years old. It is hard to imagine that he finished each sculpture in one to two years. And he had other work at the time.
Stone turned into a malleable flesh. As if there were not enough details, there is a three-headed dog.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini - Apollo and Daphne (1622–25)
Bernini chiseled this sculpture out of stone when he was 24 years old.
This is the most beautiful Bernini sculpture. If we can even grade them.
Those leafs growing out of hands, in stone, assume in a single piece of marble, pure magic!
They had the confidence, during the Renaissance, that they had taken the classical world, and brought it a step further.
To sculpt fabrics like that! That marble is so thin, there is no margin for error.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini - David (1623–24)
Bernini chiseled this sculpture out of marble when he was 25 years old.
Sculpture that includes two or three figures is somehow limited in range of motion. Because one figure is bound to the motion of the other. Especially when cast from one piece of marble. Here, Bernini is free to sculpt David like a tight spring ready to unwind. This movement is incredibly difficult. In Stone? But Bernini is done with impressing in his previous commissions, and now he can do what really interests him.
As they teach you to throw, you must unfurl your body in one motion, so you're throwing as much from the hips as you are from the arms. Look at the tightly wound stone held by the rope. How do you chisel the rope like that?
And of course, the bite on the lips is part of that human motion. Bernini has taken Michelangelo’s David and brought it alive. There is even a resemblance.
All those pagan popes and cardinals who ordered these sculptures, at least they stole money from people, so they can invest in godly, miracle art. So, you have a top of the religious order that appreciates and understands high art and willing to pay for it. But even when Jews speak of art, they can’t tell good art from bad. Autistic Rebbes that run the Jewish religion consider the fine bekeshe a high art. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, who was, as we know, the greatest artist ever lived, had no aesthetic sensibilities.
Actually, there is no more bad art. Art is a state of mind. And the more perverted you are sexually, the more of an artist you are.
Sorry to point to the truth, but Chagall, and his ideology, started this.
Where was I? Oh, the favorite student of Yudel Pen, Marc Meishe Movsha Chagall
The question that needs to be asked, how someone, who had an artistic skill of a promising 7-year-old, became the greatest Jewish artist of all time? You might say I shouldn’t compare Marc Chagall to Bernini. Bernini was at the height of the Renaissance, and Marc Chagall was in a culture hostile to visual arts.
And my answer to this would be that there were significant artists who were at the time around Vitebsk, for example Iliya Repin or Mstislav Dobuzhinsky. You might say that these were not Jews. OK, there was Valentin Serov who was a Jew after his mother, a magical artist. There was El Lissitzky also a student on Pen, a Jewish modernist with skill and vigor. Yehuda Pen himself, he had other talented students, Salomon Yudovin, Robert Falk. Chaim Sutin was a relentless talent.
You might say that Marc Chagall was a modernist, and there was a bigger modernist crap, sold and popular.
But why Marc Chagall become so famous?
Marc Chagall was a 95% hustler and 5% artist. Somehow, it’s always the case. Especially when appreciation of a good art disappears and marketing types start to decide what is a good art. Which is approximately the same reason that Coca-Cola has the biggest marketing department, there is a relationship between the product being a deadly poison, and the big marketing department.
Chagall was an active member of the masonic lodge, the Grand Orient of Russia's Peoples. I don’t need to belabor the point how it might promote a career of an artist, especially in Paris. This Russian branch of the lodge was disbanded in 1917, but its French sister, Grand Orient de France, exists to this very day. Sorry, your membership in hevra kadisha doesn’t compare.
Arrogant as he was toward his tutors, Chagall was evidently the picture of charming gratitude to the private benefactors, all of them Jewish, who underwrote his years of study in St. Petersburg and, beginning in the spring of 1911, in Paris.
After the revolution, Chagall was appointed Commissar of Arts. Is it possible without being a communist? I don’t find explicit confirmation of Chagall being a communist, but I wonder. Of course, that wouldn’t be a testament to conviction, but purely a career move. He created Vitebsk Arts College. It was not longer a private school of Yehuda Pen, but a Soviet Institution. Yehuda Pen was now at the mercy of Chagall, invited only as a teacher in this new school.
Commentary Magazine: Whatever Happened to Marc Chagall?
El Lissitzky mocked what they called: “the whole Chagallian eroticism of powdered rococo.” Bullseye!
Significantly, Chagall left the Soviet Union in time to watch his old world, his teachers, his fellow artists perish in the double punch of the messianic upheavals.
… Chagall, who after 1922 began very assiduously to market himself. He left Russia, ostensibly to transport work to an exhibition of Jewish art in Berlin, but with the explicit intention of emigrating for good; his wife and daughter followed shortly thereafter. No sooner was he out than he published his autobiography.
To write one’s memoirs at the age of thirty-six is not necessarily a mark of excessive self-regard, especially if one has lived through the Russian Revolution and experienced the Paris School in its golden age. But it suggests that Chagall was thinking of all this as a closed chapter.
Who writes an autobiography at 36? Unless you create a marketing mythology. Something Jared Kushner would write: “My days in the White House”. Chagall dedicated all his energy to self-promoting. There was no time left to learn the basic drafting skills. Chagall hated traditional art, including that of his teacher Yudel Pen. He couldn’t be bothered or wasn’t talented enough to learn how to draw. His primal colors lack nuance and have the consistency of the crude posters. When he became a commissar, he hoped that the revolution will finish the old art, indeed it deed. It finished the people more than the art.
…while a surprising number of the Jewish associates he had left behind in Russia were murdered, sooner or later, by the NKVD. Their number included Mikhoels, Walden—who had fled from Hitler to Stalin—and even poor Pen, killed weeks after Chagall recklessly sent him a jaunty letter in 1937.
I don’t use ten dollar words, “jaunty”, but I have a feeling, inadvertently Chagall might have something to do with the murder of his teacher, Yehuda Pen. Which is super symbolic and sad. Like many people who left Russia, Chagall had no idea what was happening there.
Chagall was married three times, he has a daughter from his first marriage and a son from his second wife who wasn’t Jewish.
It’s a shame that his childish doodles decorate the Knesset.
Chagall had no visible artistic evolution, he remained a promising 7-year-old all his life. Although there is some charm in those early childish Chagallian doodles.
Somehow that room smells and swells like a chasuna in the old Maryna Roscha. Renaissance, Shmenaissance…