Memories of Marc Chagall

WERE it not for the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), Belarusian-born French painter Marc Chagall would likely have perished, his granddaughter Bella Meyer told audiences at the organisation’s gala dinners in Sydney and Melbourne this month.

“Without the Joint’s input in the spring of 1941 Marc and Bella Chagall, my grandparents, would not have been able to embark from Lisbon on the ship which carried 800 other refugees towards New York,” Meyer said.

“Without the JDC funding their sailing to safety they would have most likely perished.”

Speaking about a man she “adored”, a passionate artist who needed to paint “at every breath” and for whom art was “indispensable and vital”, Meyer recalled how he “always felt safest when painting and working”.

“He was a very small man, delicate, he seemed to nearly disappear behind a landscape of brushes,” she recalled.

“Yet, his presence was incredibly luminous and when we entered a studio his face would light up and he smiled at us with such intensity, with such awe and love, you thought that a whole space was suddenly flooded with brilliant light.”

Meyer loved it when Chagall would take her hand and play with her fingers. “It felt as if he was sculpting, or as if he needed more tactile contact to experience us more fully. His gestures were very delicate, quick and precise, similar to a dance.”

She remembered a shy man, “very shy about his paintings”, who would “ask us quite sheepishly if we liked his paintings, if we liked Chagall”.

“He’d usually turn back to his canvas, scrutinise it and then say, ‘Now, it just needs a little more Chagall,’” she said.

Sometimes while painting, he would talk about his childhood; growing up in a “simple, poor but warm” Orthodox household; his loving parents, his brother and his seven sisters; about Russia; and “most of all, about Bella, his love, his muse, his wife, our grandmother”, who died in 1944.

“He would tell us how her love and her respect for his artistic quest became the guiding force for all of his creations,” Meyer said of her grandmother.

What he never talked about were the painful or difficult periods, “about the pogroms, war, hatred, hunger, loss, death, despair”.

“He poured his fears and doubts into his work. That’s what he gave us,” Meyer said. “He never told us how they escaped, about the years of exile in America and his tragic loss when Bella died suddenly. Instead he wanted us to see the beauty in the world, in us, the enchantment in art.”

EVAN ZLATKIS