Book of the Week: Chagall: Love and Exile, By Jackie Wullschlager

Moyshe Shagal, alias Moses Chagalloff, alias Marc Chagall, the Jewish-Russian-French painter of blue cows, red donkeys and green lovers, outlived his peers, his backers and his detractors to die in the south of France, in 1985, at the age of 97. He was rich, renowned, in some quarters revered; yet he was not content. It was a long way from the shtetl of Vitebsk to the showcase of Saint-Paul-de-Vence. The man who became Chagall was painfully conscious of that distance.

In his grand old age he became something of a living legend, but what he lived and relived was the serial exile, the homelessness, the precariousness, and perhaps the uncomfortable feeling that his best work was behind him – way behind. Out of this came the insatiable need for cosseting and the ceaseless desire for acclaim. Dear old Chagall had a mercenary streak, and a tendency towards monumentality, as his biographer Jackie Wullschlager politely puts it.

Between the greed and the grandiosity his capacity for self-renewal was stifled. "Late Chagall" is a non-event. In lieu of roots, he put down markers. He wanted a wall, he said, to scale his ambition. Museums, theatres, churches, parliaments – cathedrals sacred and profane – bore the signature of his fantastical, flyaway art. Chagall's characteristic forms circled the globe. The signature was freely employed (too freely). He salted away millions. He was unassuaged. "Do you love Chagall?" he would ask, insistently, to the end.

Wullschlager tracks this long life from cradle to grave. She is a deft and sympathetic biographer, with an eye for detail, a feel for cultural milieux, and a better grasp of narrative construction than her subject. Wullschlager's Chagall surely becomes the benchmark Chagall, the natural point of entry for anyone curious about this deceptive and in some ways deceiving figure.

Possibly because of the accepted characterisation of his work – playful, colourful, fanciful, wistful – and because of his timeless self-presentation as twinkling faun, Chagall is apt to be infantilised, or sentimentalised, as a small boy or a peasant clairvoyant reaching out his hand for the moon. In fact, he was more fox than faun. The truth beneath the twinkle had to do with a certain heedlessness, a carelessness of others, that cannot but be diminishing. Chagall was ruthlessly self-centred. He was a small man: smaller than he should have been.

The book gains in depth from Wullschlager's sensitivity to the role of women in the Chagall story. A latter-day Vasari would not be writing the lives but rather the wives of the artists (and eventually, perhaps, the husbands). Ruth Butler has recently essayed this for Cézanne, Monet and Rodin; Gabriel Josipovici's tender fictional treatment of Bonnard, Contre-jour (1986), has a similar focus. Hilary Spurling's Matisse and John Richardson's Picasso both foreground their womenfolk and scrutinise their relationships, wifely and other. Wullschlager draws a comparison between the thwarted lives of so many of these women and that of Bella Rosenfeld, the first and the determining Madame Chagall, "muse, manager and mother" to the would-be genius.

Bella was vital to Chagall in all sorts of ways, some of which he barely understood. In what we might now call artistic self-fashioning, she reigned supreme. It was Bella who stage-managed their entry into Berlin society in 1922. Two years later, she repeated the trick in Paris – no mean feat – arriving equipped with the language, the culture (a list of the best patisseries) and enough Kashmir shawls and Baku textiles to furnish a kind of Russia-in-miniature, according to the Parisian imagination, as depicted in Chagall's own paintings.

It was Bella who established the Chagall brand in literary form, translating his fragmentary autobiography from Russian into French. Ma Vie (1931) is très Chagall, as the artist would learn to say, but that very quality may be more of a collaboration than is usually granted – "Marc's world through Bella's glasses," according to her granddaughter.

Women's work also yields telling detail. Chagall's women would read aloud to him while he worked. Bella read Gogol's Dead Souls (in Russian) as he illustrated it, and the Bible (in Yiddish) while he painted her portrait. A later companion, Virginia Haggard, read biographies of Goya, Gauguin and Van Gogh, because he identified with them. Chagall's selections lean towards the self-aggrandising, and perhaps also the merchandising. His choice of Dead Souls spoke of an identification with Gogol; he also compared himself to Kafka, Delacroix and Matisse; and his autobiography contains a curious reflection on "my relatives, Rembrandt, my mother, Cézanne, my grandfather, my wife" (another one).

This is exalted company – which was precisely the point – and it is not at all clear that Chagall measures up, as man or artist. Wullschlager finds a caesura in the art and the life when he left Russia in 1922, at 35. Neither his inspiration nor his execution was ever as strong again, though he lived another half-century. His biographer is trenchant enough on the weaknesses of that long declension, but she also tends to overestimate the work. There are too many masterpieces here, too many brilliant works; and she is sometimes tempted to collude in the artist's own comparisons. So in the run-up to the Second World War, "each work was a political cry, the lyricism and colour carrying the message, and when among these works one monumental canvas – White Crucifixion – was drained of colour, it stood out to become, like Picasso's Guernica, Chagall's masterpiece and major political statement of the late 1930s".

For the most part, Wullschlager is a discriminating guide. Chagall is sumptuously produced. It is full of marvellous (if slightly muddy) family photographs, not to mention the colour plates, and the beautiful, poignant, delicate drawings. Wullschlager is especially good on the photographs, offering commentaries at once empathic and acute on what they reveal of relationships, strategies, subterfuges, tensions and emotions. These photographic moments often seem to crystallise something in the biographical investigation – a sophisticated technique.

Wullschlager's biographical model is perhaps Hilary Spurling's Matisse, with a dash of John Richardson in high-society mode. This project has some affinity with Spurling's, in its exhaustive research, its impressive handling, and its recuperative frame. The gulf between them lies in the nature of their subjects. Matisse was a great master, whose life was curiously unplumbed. Chagall by comparison was little more than a talented postulant, whose life was picaresque and art over-praised. He thought he was hard done by, but he was quite wrong. He is fortunate in his biographer.

Alex Danchev's biography of Georges Braque is published by Penguin. His latest book is 'Picasso Furioso' (Dilecta)

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born in 1887, the eldest of nine children, in what is now Belarus. He moved to St Petersburg in 1907 to paint. Having made his name in Paris, he and Bella, his wife, fled the Nazi occupation to settle in the USA. He said: "If I were not a Jew... I wouldn't have been an artist, or I would be a different artist altogether." 'Ma Vie', his memoir, was written in 1922 and published in Paris in 1930 with watercolour illustrations. He died in the south of France in 1985, aged 97.

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