The Soulful Modernism of Chagall and Rothko
As the sun rose upon the earth and Lot entered Zoar, the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah sulfurous fire from the Lord out of heaven. He annihilated those cities and the entire Plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities and the vegetation of the ground. Lot’s wife looked back, and she thereupon turned into a pillar of salt.
Next morning, Abraham hurried to the place where he had stood before the Lord, and, looking down toward Sodom and Gomorrah and all the land of the Plain, he saw the smoke of the land rising like the smoke of a kiln.
—Genesis 19:23–28
Genesis frames the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in language so matter of fact it could be meteorological account, not story. Apocalypse requires only a sentence: in the time it takes to blink dust from your eye, the city is gone. A few more words and Lot’s wife has disappeared. Abraham looks back at the dead land through air that still quivers with heat, but the writers of Genesis do not spare a heartbeat to mourn the woman’s passing.
The absence of commemoration may be memorial’s purest form but vanishing haunts like neglect. In the Greek narratives that precede Judaism, renewal tempers dissolution. Roses bloom when Persephone rejoins Demeter every summer. The lilt of Orpheus’s lyre calls back Eurydice. In lines of verse that stretch over story the way tendon slides over bone, Ovid, a Roman poet, reshapes the halfway human into beautiful form. Extinction translates into alchemy as a torso stiffens into a tree trunk and the glint of blonde hair trembles amid flickering leaves.
The destruction of Lot’s wife, for obvious reasons, involves no such sensuality. There is metamorphosis here, but nothing transformative. Obliterated for a backward glance, Lot’s wife is permitted neither reprieve nor the solace of sorrow. Homesickness for a distempered place destroys her and then God annihilates her memory. Old Testament punishment boasts an elegant symmetry: the woman who refuses to leave without regret is fused to the place where she took her last look. The lines of prose do not deny feeling; they vaporize it. The soft skin of Idit’s upper thigh, the warmth of her breath, the pulse beating fast in her throat and temple: all harden at once to mineral. The tears that dry into a pillar of salt offer merely a stone’s grief.
This economy of expression is almost unintelligible in the context of contemporary effusiveness. Our public performances of desolation, as of delight, are closer to Greek catharsis than to Judaism’s spare aesthetic. The art we create is about display, not concealment; about open-throated mourning, not a blank misery beyond sight and sound. Nonetheless, there is something terrifying about the vacancy Abraham witnesses, this still world lacking any movement but the smoke rising from scorched earth. Its emptiness is absolute, refusing even to harbor grief for what is no longer there: the children squatting in a shady corner, playing house with sticks; the woman intent on scrubbing the dirty hem of a dress; the red-faced baker heaving a tray of loaves from an oven. As if bowing their heads before God’s disciplining fire, the writers of Genesis do not testify to the remains of human presence. They give us only blackened earth, the smell of fire, and silence.
Old Testament narrative takes the way of blind prophets who have no need for eyes. Its stories require inward listening, not watchfulness. More often than not they hinge upon refusal, or deprivation. Grief evaporates with incinerated bodies. Sulfur leaches color from fire and rain blunts its heat. As readers we are hostage to this writing, refused sight, hearing, and speech. Perhaps an acrid odor hovers, but we must infer its trace from lines too gaunt to offer sensual evocation. The seared air tastes like gunmetal on the tongue. Salt and sulfur: the materials of a star, or the primeval earth.
Such is Jewish artistry with language. The writing is as starkly beautiful as the desert landscapes upon which its authors lived and died. Yet by nature its aesthetic is one hostile to visual representation. What images could illustrate the instantaneous death of Lot’s wife? What palette could color the void? The story of Sodom and Gomorrah enacts the prohibition against image making as unequivocally as the story of the golden calf. Paradoxically, the simile that provides this account of destruction with its solitary embellishment transforms hearths into funeral pyres.
Fast forward to another apocalypse, several millennia later. In 1919, a bomb whistles through the atmosphere of a German town in the early morning silence. In seconds, the village becomes a volcano. Fragments of metal, flesh, and glass fuse and rain down on Earth. Fire scours the detritus clean. In France, 7 percent of the population leaves for the front lines and does not return. Gas masks spare some firstborn sons in Europe’s trenches, but many are not passed over: years later, their dreams of blood and smoke will throttle them nightly. The plague worms its way into Spain only to smite twenty million worldwide. And in Russia? The empire murders its people, and the people turn upon the empire. This is the spectacle of revolution: bayonets stab their way through crowds in Red Square, knives slash tapestries off the walls of country estates, filthy arms sweep gold dishes to the floor in the Winter Palace, tearing the place apart as if it were a used stage set. In a basement room in the city of Ekaterinburg at two o’clock one morning, Nicholas II, a confused Caesar, speaks his final, undignified words—“What? What?”—before being executed, as luck would have it, by a Jewish member of Lenin’s secret police. In the streets, Reds and Whites tear flesh from flesh. In the country, Lenin’s guards tear up houses and farms looking for grain. And in the villages and towns where Jews live in the Pale of Settlement, the anti-Semitism that permeates the Russian air grows immediately more toxic. “The chosen people of the Bolsheviks,” sneers one White officer, as historian Orlando Figes documents in A People’s Tragedy. Calls for retribution like this transform sporadic pogroms into systemic slaughter.
Two decades after the fields were cleared of bodies and the rutted earth furred over with grass, Mark Rothko began to recall the silent wastes. To my mind, no one more closely approximates the Old Testament despair of modern devastation than this painter. His Seagram murals, a series of orange verticals rising up from black, evoke the spare altars of the ancients. These charred-seeming canvases are the kiln of tragedy, suggesting sacrifice. Dramatic in their bleakness, they are suffused with awe. The panels the painter arranged several years later in Houston recall the quiet after destruction. Under the light filtering in from the ceiling, the almost indiscernible gradations of blue-black in the canvases that make up the Rothko chapel evoke a quality of empathy more profound than that engineered by a Holocaust museum or war memorial.
The Dvinsk-born artist’s earlier works, rendered in more forgiving tones, diffuse an equally mesmerizing brightness. I have sat before the crimson and indigo rectangles of Number 14, 1960 in San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art more times than I can count. Rothko overpainted this canvas with several washes and the forms shimmering upon its surface seem to float. As I contemplate the painting, the indeterminate edges of these shapes expand until they absorb my field of vision. The smaller blue rectangle rests on the bottom of the canvas as if it were a boat moored in quiet water. Over it, the red hovers like darkening air. The painting invites and rebuffs entrance simultaneously, the way the line between sea and sky draws you near at the same time that it estranges you from its grandeur. The black hue bordering and dividing these colored forms blurs in and out of my sight. Its charcoal color feels as external as the darkness of space and as intimate as the mind-darkness from which memory’s images surface.
Rothko makes apocalypse understandable by investing it with human feeling. Marc Chagall, a painter born sixteen years earlier in Vitebsk, imagines Eden to recall us to rapture. Though he endured the Russian Revolution and the First World War and then dodged the Holocaust as a refugee, he continued to paint delight. To stand in front of his canvases is to be bathed in color resplendent as stained glass. In the face of sorrow (the loss of his wife, Bella, the loss of his country, the losses suffered by his people), Chagall’s paintings are joyous folktales whose lively compositions dance to the unheard cadences of klezmer. In The Promenade (1917), Birthday (1915), and Over the Village (1914–18), tributes to Bella he painted in the first years of their marriage, secular history bows to sacred time. In place of blood-rust, the burnt umber of charred buildings, and the washed-out sepia of war, Chagall selects softly brilliant hues: rose, violet, celestial blue. Color defies the monochrome of waste. The buoyant space of his paintings floats viewers upward: away from the front, the operating table, the nighttime breadlines lengthening and lengthening in the subzero streets.
The tension in Rothko’s paintings reminds you that you hold yourself upright in defiance of Earth’s gravity. Chagall makes you weightless. The figures in his canvases are often poised halfway between ground and atmosphere; watching them, it is easy to imagine your own hold relinquished. To look at the canvases is to drift through the skies above Vitebsk, to fly alongside the Eiffel Tower or to soar toward the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in a dream of Paris, a visual aria no less lovely than the voices rising up from the stage.
In the language of space Chagall finds a way to figure time so that the high-flown perspectives of the canvases carry us far away from the present. Choosing to adopt the tender but distant gaze of the angels who hover in his paintings, he creates in his viewers a sense of distracted affiliation toward the proceedings that unfold in front of them. Fragments of feeling—love, tenderness, joy—rise upward like the thoughts the celestial onlookers in Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire overhear as they linger above a girl folding shirts in a clothing store and a small boy reading in his room. Chagall’s gaze is equally a benediction, a hand placed lightly on the forehead of the sleeper to soothe a restless mind. War, famine, the bile of revenge—this too will pass, the canvases seem to say.
In The Promenade, finished during the tumultuous period of the 1917 Revolution, Chagall makes Russia green again. The artist and his wife are in the foreground. The outlines of the city of Vitebsk, painted the color of fat summer leaves, create a low horizon. Debonair as a musician in a black tux, the young Chagall stands facing us. He is smiling. One foot rests upon the edge of a ruby-colored picnic cloth decorated with flowers, where a carafe and a glass of wine also sit. In his right hand, the artist holds a bird. His left, extended heavenward, clasps Bella’s hand as if her palm were the string of a balloon. Fuchsia-colored, serene, she floats above him, her body inclined in parallel with the emerald earth. The opaque sky is tenderer than the jade benediction of grass and houses, gentler than the coral church dome whose soft color Bella’s dress curiously echoes. Lovely as a pearl, lovely as Bella, this luminous atmosphere makes your own heart rise.
I look at this painting of lovers with my own by my side and feel a transient joy. Happinesses of the present and past mingle, and there is the sweetness of surfeit. It is a moment in which the intangibilities of feeling are too fine for speech. Chagall’s sky glows with a faint opalescence, like snow reflecting the colored light of sunset. The wash of tones evokes recollections as finely graded. The thin clear air of New Mexico at dusk. The smell of rain from an open door. The sound of wood beams creaking as a house cools in the darkness. For a moment, my separate selves merge. In the same instant I become aware of their different existences, they are reconciled.
What do we really see when we look at a painting such as The Promenade? Is it memory that enriches painting? Or something in the canvas that restores recollection? We assume that the power visual artists hold rests in their ability to provoke us by seeing differently—by making things strange. Not so. The new might turn our heads, but something deeper keeps us looking, something that resonates with our own visual fields, horizon lines sustained as much from the insight of memory as from sight itself. If a painting works, it haunts us until what we assumed existed outside of us becomes part of ourselves. Art reconciles the blurry silhouettes of memory that shadow us as we stand in the noon sun of the present. Its design offers us a way to discipline the fragments of our past that surface at random—a picnic overlooking the olive slopes of falling away hills outside the Santa Fe opera, the salmon-colored tie a brother wore to his medical school graduation, the cantilevered struts of the Eiffel Tower’s steps you climbed with a daughter one afternoon. In this way, looking at a painting can be a way to understand, as Hemingway writes in A Moveable Feast, how time can both go “very slowly” and “all at once.”
I stare at this work and wonder what visual grammar enables its arrangement of color and form to speak to me, while a nearby painting composed like this one from a pattern of shapes and hues remains inert. A curious chemistry animates the layers of pigment on canvas. Just as a recollected image brings back time and place, trespassing every means by which we understand the world outside ourselves, so the eye that regards this painting ushers in all five senses. Its frame blurs into the grainy diffuseness of my peripheral vision and I realize that I am no longer seeing as much as thinking, hearing, recollecting. Like much of Chagall’s best work, this painting returns me to the past as the canvas opens before my eyes in the moment. In place of the modern wasteland of the Russian Revolution and World War I, a second that refuses to tick past, the Vitebsk artist substitutes an instant of love whose fullness compensates for its transience: quantity stretched to its limit. The two linked figures shimmer on the canvas like midsummer, like a dragonfly glimpsed before its iridescence darts past your eye, like the dome of sky on a day “serene from the start, almost painfully slowed” as Stanley Kunitz offers in his translation of Osip Mandelstam’s poem “Summer Solstice.”
As with Rothko’s Seagram murals, Chagall’s The Promenade does not exact a distancing admiration. Instead, its intimacy enraptures. Neither painter possessed Picasso’s virtuoso technique or angry energy, but the canvases of both Rothko and Chagall provoke an expressive response the Spanish innovator rarely elicits. Gaze at one of his works, and you are reminded none too gently of the chasm that separates you from this virtuoso. Chagall’s energy, like Rothko’s, is entirely directed toward communication. How unlike the fracturing, fragmenting canvases of modernism, their invitation to reflection. Cubism shatters the complacencies of vision only to offer us the jagged sight-lines of competing perspectives. Rothko and Chagall provide completion, not division. You look at them not to see the world but to know yourself.
What does it mean to dedicate your life’s energy to what is considered impossible, a blasphemy, a contradiction in terms? To be a Jewish painter in Russia at the turn of the century was to cast off the religious strictures of familial embrace and to defy the legal prohibitions that denied Jews the liberties other Russian citizens enjoyed: the freedom to own land, to attend public school, to live in the city or town of your own choosing. And yet both Marc Chagall and Mark Rothko remained obdurately committed to visual expression in a culture and a country united perhaps only in this, its refusal to permit any such authority. The Vitebsk native was cheerful, energetic, and gregarious despite his constant impatience with the social life that stole painting time. The youth from Dvinsk was the mirror of melancholy, an urbane but solitary person who walked the night streets of New York City as if he had stepped out of an Edward Hopper canvas. Both Chagall and Rothko were iconoclasts driven to learn a visual idiom no one around them cared to speak. The early years saw them devoted to a profession so little enamored it did not muster the energy sufficient to ostracize them. But at their deaths they left behind the canvases familiar to us on the walls of the world’s most distinguished museums.
In the decades before Chagall and Rothko began painting, few Jewish artists came to prominence in Russia. Only a scattering attended the illustrious St. Petersburg Imperial Academy of Art and its more progressive counterpart, the Moscow School. But Russia’s relentless anti-Semitism did not wholly prevent exceptional painters from thriving. When Isaak Levitan died in 1900 from a bad heart at forty, he left Russia his evocative renderings of its countryside. His success might have been prompted by Anton Chekhov, who vigorously championed him and with whom he was inseparable at twenty. Maybe it was simply Levitan’s studiedly pastoral repertoire that appealed. Or perhaps this artist’s celebrity was ensured by the patronage of Sergei Treyakov, the businessman who founded the distinguished gallery that bears his name in Moscow. Regardless, though poor and Jewish, Levitan became, by the age of thirty-five, one of Russia’s most renowned painters.
Two decades before Chagall honored his family’s faith in portraits such as The Rabbi (1922) and Jew with Torah (1925), Levitan promoted landscape painting, a genre just developing in Russia, which usually equated rural iconography with nationalism. Weathered roofs of village houses, lakes darkened with cloud cover, plains golden with stubble or the new green of May: this was the artist’s repertoire—lovely, distinctively Russian, disarmingly rustic for a Moscow orphan. That Levitan’s paintings conspicuously lacked any reference to Judaism hardly hindered his growing fame. Whether his project was self-negating remains an open question, despite the anecdote critic Averil King offers in Isaak Levitan: Lyrical Landscape. As the artist painted with colleague Konstantin Vysotsky by the banks of the Volga, church bells sounded in the distance. Not “ostentatiously, but deliberately enough” for his companion to observe, the Jewish painter made the sign of the cross. Was the gesture devout? A dissembling for safety’s sake? Or did Levitan simply wish to acknowledge the other’s faith in the reverence of a deepening twilight?
Studying Vladimirka Road (1892) in London’s National Gallery, where it was on view during an exhibition of nineteenth-century Russian painting, afforded me no definitive answers. This large canvas is beautiful and oppressive. Grasses blow in the foreground, but winter is incipient in the scudding clouds overhead. Vladimirka was an infamous route, the path trod by dissidents, many of them Jewish, as they marched in shackles toward the labor camps of Siberia. The contrast between the land’s verdancy and the dark sky, then, speaks more than seasonal melancholy. The leisurely movement of fall toward the dark season ahead would have been nothing to the creeping passage of years these prisoners faced. Contemplating this painting, I could not help but see its dirt track as the artist’s way of gesturing toward such painful extension. The road stretches monotonously across the canvas toward an inscrutable end on the horizon. Here a tiny black-clothed woman stands solitary, the small vertical of a wayside altar her only measure.
Above Eternal Rest (1894), the painter’s own favorite work, re-creates not just altar but church entire. Here, too, the gesture toward Christianity in the canvas remains unreadable. Taking their cue from its title, most Russian accounts of this painting ignore the preposition and reduce the work’s tension to the pull between life and death. (But then they also refuse to acknowledge the artist’s Jewishness, despite the well-known self-portrait whose broad brushstrokes, gesturing incompletely toward throat and chest, resemble the fringes of the tallis that might have rested there.) The painting does not take the church, that resonant symbol for Russian orthodoxy, as its focal point but rather the landscape that broods over this diminutive structure. The sky is purpled with cloud cover, the plain fertile. Bowed trees threaten to engulf the church, whose weather-beaten front huddles against the atmosphere like a laborer against the cold. A cross spindles up from its dun-colored roof. Frail, buffeted like a weathervane, the icon looks tentative. Clearly, glory is not housed within this mean structure. Instead, it resides in the munificent sweep of the sky above where clouds gather opulent, majestic, and darkly beautiful.
Chagall’s provocation shares little with Levitan’s coded resistance. The martyred Christ is defiantly robed in a Jewish prayer shawl in the 1938 painting White Crucifixion (1938) while the coral-colored church of The Promenade acts merely as accompaniment to Bella’s pink dress and loftier spirit. And yet there is in the work of the earlier painter a resilience whose energy gestures toward Chagall’s vibrant compositions. Sun plays brilliantly across snow, black rooks nest in bare March branches, and mud-splashed stalks push their way through frozen ground. Born into a land covered with ice nine months of the year, Levitan’s evocation of the earth’s turn toward spring seems to prefigure yearnings more openly expressed in the work of the Vitebsk-born artist who will come of age the year the celebrated landscape painter dies.
New growth quickens in Levitan’s and Chagall’s canvases, but their nation’s political terrain remained bleak. Early twentieth-century Russia was a place nearly impossible to feel at ease in, a country where peasants tilled the land with Stone Age tools even as the technologies of modern warfare ravaged the soil’s laboriously plowed surface. The soul-churning years of violence that inaugurated the Soviet regime reached from the Baltic to the Black Seas, from Byelorussia to the Ukraine. A country of negatives, postimperial Russia was pinched and thin, with no wood to heat the frigid winter air and no bread to stop the stomach from cramping. In the five years that followed the 1917 Revolution, ten million died by violence direct or indirect: famine, war wounds, typhus contracted from filthy city water, torture practiced by the Cheka, the state’s secret police.
Urban serfs without the consolation of an attachment to the land, Jewish Russians suffered well before the onset of the Revolution. In 1879, scapegoated after an attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II, those who had managed to return to Moscow were expelled again. Retaliatory pogroms wreaked havoc through the next decade in Vitebsk, Chagall’s much-loved city. After the 1905 revolution, soldiers moved into Dvinsk, home to Rothko’s family. The garrison surveyed the town’s Jewish residents with open hostility. By 1913, Rothko’s family fled the country.
As an adult Rothko was largely apolitical. But in Russia, as an adolescent, he had flirted with the radical arguments his neighbors favored. Long years after his emigration, a residual fear shaped his translation of memory onto canvas. Stories of mass graves dug in the woods outside his hometown reappear in the rectangular depths of his mature paintings. Chagall remained in Soviet Russia until 1922, walking the same Moscow streets as Maxim Gorky and Anna Akhmatova. But in canvases like The Burning House (1913) and the 1940 paintings Fire in the Snow and The Burning Village, he figured spirals of smoke from pogroms in two-toned skies. To the right and left of the tallis-shrouded Jesus in White Crucifixion (1938), flames flicker and rise.
The point here is not simply location, location, location—though place undeniably helps define perception. At the turn of the century (as today, some would say), Russia possessed a doubled and divided sense of self. Tsarist governments displaced Jewish residents beyond the Pale because their uneasy minority status reminded the nation of its own inferiority complex. The same admixture of pride and shame that has frequently characterized Jewish identity colored this country that spans East and West but bridges neither. At the start of the twentieth century, Russia was crippled by self-doubt and derision, by too earnest a cosmopolitanism, and by a flagrant obsession with European cultural values. At the same time, Russians possessed a strong sense of their self-distinction as a people. Many of them might well have anticipated the interrogative Aciman’s Uncle Vili repeats throughout Out of Egypt—“Are we, or aren’t we?”—if without this character’s unshakable satisfaction or breezy irony.
Were they, or weren’t they, Russian? Paris sheltered Chagall for most of his life, but Vitebsk was home. New York lionized Rothko, and still this city was not his own. Critics who evaluate the contributions of these painters exclusively in the context of European and American ideas misunderstand their work at its core. Despite its sophistication and verve, the modernism of Paris and Berlin appeared to both Chagall and Rothko passionless and superficial, devoid of what the latter called “measure”—the sense of oppositions held in balance. The avant-garde movement of his Western contemporaries, Chagall scoffs in My Life, was a “revolution . . . only of the surface.” Sarcastically echoing the expression that launched the French Revolution, the artist derides cubism’s faddishness by defining its practitioners as self-indulgent royalists: “Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables!” “My art,” he continues, is “a wild art, a blazing quicksilver, a blue soul flashing.” Sounding a note uncomfortably close to the faith he wished to distance himself from, Chagall indicts the West’s “technical art” as one that made “a god of formalism.” The only correct response to this apostasy, he adds dryly, is “an expiatory bath.”
Madonnas, magdalens, pietàs, and a glimpse of God in a form like our own: Roman Catholicism was the half-shell that supported Western painting’s birth, and cradle of its beauty. Fra Angelico’s worshipful canvases offer tints pure as flowers and glossy as water. Watched over by the church officials who were his chief patrons, Michelangelo modeled the human body so precisely in frescoes that beginning physicians made these works their anatomy textbooks. It was this artist who rendered the stunning blasphemy that looks down upon us from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, God’s human-seeming finger extended to meet Adam’s yearning hand. The Vatican gave equal encouragement to Raphael, whose virtuoso compositional skills remain on view in the Disputà he frescoed on a library wall in the papal city. In his disputation, Raphael endowed the sacrament with dissimulating harmony and its gesticulating figures with a nobility of address. Five hundred years later, modernism remained obligated to the Church, exploiting its rebellious, intemperate palette to evoke secular magdalens. The moon flesh of Manet’s Olympia glows starkly against the green of gardens. The Moulin Rouge dancers Toulouse Lautrec painted are gaudy daubs, their mouths streaked crimson, the mustard yellow of their evening dresses dirtied to a darker turmeric.
For centuries, the Church has provided artists both a visual rhetoric and financial support. Catholicism relies upon figures to render the supernatural in all its fleshly beauty. But the Judaism that Chagall and Rothko were born into burns away all decoration in its hunger for the word. The word is the world, creating light, dividing water from sky, bidding living creatures fly, creep, and walk across the land. Spoken or written, Hebrew is not means but end, its aleph and bet the calculus of a divinity people referred to only glancingly as G-d. Gaze through museum glass at the intricate beauty of an illuminated manuscript that has been defaced by time and circumstance and you know you have lost a world. But the pious can witness the fragile parchment of Dead Sea scrolls crumble into dust without complaint, knowing them to be merely the shed skin of living words.
Defying their families in order to paint, Chagall and Rothko produced work informed by their Jewish sensibilities. Yet their experiments with form and faith cannot be extrapolated from their sense of themselves as Russians, either. Both artists claimed their country with a rueful tenderness that never crept into the dispassionate language with which they referred to adopted homes in France and the United States. Thousands of miles away from the open space of the northern tundra and the onion domes of the Moscow skyline, decades removed from the sounds of Russian speech and the taste of pickled cabbage, this land of their birth twined itself around memory until it became synonymous with the map of their physical selves, familiar as the timbre of voice, the length of stride, the twinge in the shoulder recalling an old muscle injury. Vitebsk, Chagall figured everywhere: in the background and foreground of his canvases, in trees shimmering in the night sky, in figures dancing above church domes and housetops, in the pastel colors of flowers that reimagine perfumed scents in paint.
Home is harder to see in Rothko’s abstractions. Still, an unmistakable intimacy lives in the push-me-pull-you tension of his paintings. The contours of Rothko’s forms glimmer and shine. The gauzy rectangles expand and shrink. The paintings—frames without location, questions without context—feel like doorways to a deeply shadowed past. Something in their breathing presence recalls my earliest memory, home in time if not in space. At two, my small child’s form stands expectantly in front of a similar black rectangle. The door is ajar (did I open it?). The gloom is infinite (will I fall off the world if I step inside?). Before the hard earth-smelling objects rain down on my head—potatoes in a cupboard, perhaps—I look out with awe and curiosity at the unbounded darkness. Gazing now at Rothko’s sentient geometry, I feel equally unmoored and at home.
In the context of their country’s refusal to embrace them, the nostalgia palpable in the work of Chagall and Rothko is both perplexing and touching. In memory Russia was the reedy contralto of the clarinet, or maybe borscht and sour cream, the taste of the soil in the purpled roots of beets, the tang of sky in the cloud whiteness of the curdled milk. If only in fantasy, these painters could enjoy the land’s salt and sour: bread, pickles, briny herring. But how to paint a childhood idyllic only in dream? Even to choose the medium— Chagall’s stained glass? the black and gray acrylics with which Rothko closed out his career?—was to displace themselves twice over, to distance themselves beyond the Pale not just of Russia but of the family’s sheltering circle. Long before Rothko left Dvinsk in 1913, he had memorized the Hebraic laws that prohibit the making of iconic images. Chaim Soutine, the Belarusian artist born six years after Chagall, was badly beaten by the son of a rabbi whose portrait he had wished to paint. And Chagall? In My Life, the artist remembers how his father walked into the kitchen half frozen after lifting heavy barrels of herring all day. With stiffened fingers he drew from his pocket “a pile of cakes, of frozen pears” to pass out to his children with a “brown and wrinkled hand.” Yet when the son he loved so dearly asked him for five rubles, the price of a month’s art lessons, this man who brought “the evening . . . in with him” flung the coins in the child’s face. The adult painter forgave the insult, but he never forgot “with how many tears and with what pride” he had gathered up the shiny circles.
The absence of images on the walls of Russian Jewish homes was all the more striking in a country whose meanest peasant huts gave pride of place to religious iconography. Portraits of the Madonna and Child, together with representations of the Father-Tsar, graced every Russian home. The iconography of imperial Russia’s first family served as a visible reminder of the ties that had bound serf to landowner to political leader for centuries. Those of us born in the West may find the sanctification of Soviet leaders in official portraits uneasily religious, even hypocritical, but so central was hagiography to the Russian state that the portraits of Lenin and Stalin mandated for Soviet homes simply gravitated to the spaces made vacant by the Virgin and the tsar. Such was the context within which the walls of Jewish households stood resolutely bare. For Chagall as for Soutine, to make art was to insult the memory of the people who bore you, to choose the visual rhetoric of the Russian Church over your father’s murmured blessing. Consulting one of Vitebsk’s rabbis as a young man, Chagall confessed that the “pale face” of Christ had long troubled him. But, the painter recalls in My Life, he received no answers to his questions about faith. Were the Israelites “really the chosen people of God”? Would the rabbi talk to him about his work and instill in him “a little of the divine spirit”? No. Without a backward glance, Chagall “reached the door and went out.”
In memory, however, he returned to his birthplace again and again. As Rothko spoke of Dvinsk, so Chagall talked of Vitebsk: in the unshadowed timbres people use when surprised into speaking what is deepest. Orlando Figes concludes Natasha’s Dance, his cultural history of Russia, with Igor Stravinsky’s strikingly romantic confession of nationalistic faith: “The smell of the Russian earth is different, and such things are impossible to forget. . . . A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country—he can have only one country—and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life. . . . I did not leave Russia of my own will, even though I disliked much in my Russia and in Russia generally. Yet the right to criticize Russia is mine, because Russia is mine and because I love it, and I do not give any foreigner that right.”
For Moische Segal and Marcus Rothkowitz, home was homely as the given names they buried in Russia as they fled. “Uncanny,” Freud called it, this place terrifying not in its strangeness but its domesticity. The atmosphere of Vitebsk and of Dvinsk in which the artists grew to boyhood was as familiar as the opaque brightness you see behind your closed eyelids, and suffocatingly close. Living in these insular, mostly Jewish towns was like drowsing on a raft above still water, your skin warmed by sun. (It is just this quality the sentient, wavering forms of Rothko’s canvases invoke.) To be home in Russia was to be safely islanded in a sea of peoples and politicians who spoke about you but never to you, thinking you inassimilable and unredeemed. Locked in a familial embrace, yearning for a different life but still loving this one: the boyhood Chagall and Rothko remembered was one you might as well call sleep.
Indeed, the crowded catalogue that closes Call It Sleep, Henry Roth’s stunning novel of immigrant life in the New World, could equally describe the claustrophobic fellowship Chagall and Rothko knew as youths: “It was only toward sleep that every wink of the eyelids could strike a spark into the cloudy tinder of the dark, kindle out of shadowy corners of the bedroom such myriad and such vivid jets of images—of the glint on tilted beards, of the uneven shine on roller skates, of the dry light on gray stone stoops, of the tapering glitter of rails, of the oily sheen on the night-smooth rivers, of the glow on thin blonde hair, red faces, of the glow on the outstretched, open palms of legions upon legions of hands hurtling toward him.” Russia was beautiful like this and also foreboding—summer light darkened by thunderheads. Somnolent but fevered, Roth’s prose recalls the languorous energy of Chagall’s canvases and the intimate abstractions of Rothko’s work.
In the end, something deeper than politics informs their painting, just as it colors the poetry of fellow Russian Anna Akhmatova. The writer remained in St. Petersburg through the terrible years of Stalin’s regime, but in “Lot’s Wife” (1922–24), she expressed her painful attachment to country in terms the emigrant painters knew all too well. Choosing the vantage of exile to honor the ravaged ground under her feet, Akhmatova revisits the ruins of ancient cities to evoke the funeral pyre Russia has become. The country’s wasted population is biblical in its abject misery, each death unremembered. “Who mourns one woman in a Holocaust?” Akhmatova asks, only to answer by calling the woman back to life. In this twentieth-century rewriting of Genesis, Lot’s wife remains poised at the moment of departure. Shadowed by uneasiness, she hears the whisper of an imp in her ear: “It’s not too late, you can look back still / At the red towers of Sodom, the place that bore you.”
Despite her fear of political reprisal and her anguish at the vacancy of the country’s gutted heart, Akhmatova heeded this advice. From inside her apartment she watched St. Petersburg die with excruciating slowness while she wrote of Idit’s instantaneous obliteration. “Her eyes that were still turning when a bolt / Of pain shot through them, were instantly blind; / Her body turned into transparent salt, / And her swift legs were rooted to the ground.” The poet’s unforgiving words claw away the erotic veil that beautifies Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The mutation Akhmatova gives us freezes the half-human form in the act of its self-destroying glance. Neck arching in a painful turn, her face inclines toward home. Back muscles cramp as her body torques toward the place that bore her.
From Israel’s deserts to the cold waste of Siberia is not, after all, so long a trip: Lot’s wife is transfixed, as if she were trapped under the clear ice of the Volga, her hair fanned about her face, her milky eyes cataracted by frost. Chagall’s country is quick with life, but in the poet’s heart, Russia remains a land of winter. “Evening Room” describes the failure of a love affair as the onset of the barren season: “Water becoming ice is slowing in / The narrow channels. / Nothing at all will happen here again, / Will ever happen.” Three years later, “The Guest” possesses the same torpor. “Nothing is different,” the poet writes despairingly. “Thin snow beats / Against the dining-room window-pane. / I am totally unchanged.” Nothing changes—but nothing vanishes either. Like Gorky, Akhmatova was disillusioned and embittered, but she never abandoned home. In the midst of Stalin’s purges, Russia was hers to mourn, and she crooned to the land in her own tongue; obliquely, yes, but full of feeling, with the shorthand of intimates.
What words could convey the awkward amalgam of feeling that rose in the hearts of Chagall and Rothko on the eve of their departure from the place that refused to claim them? Dreaming, their ears recognized Russian as their native language. Awake, they heard their Jewish names reviled in its Slavic inflections. As a nine-year-old, Rothko ate breakfast to the sounds of Yiddish and spent his school hours reciting the cheder’s Talmud in fluent Hebrew. At thirty-four, as he readied himself to leave for Paris, Chagall called his life story My Life but lettered his canvases with Hebrew script. Stalin’s regime was a nightmare for Akhmatova, Mother Russia punishing unruly behavior with a parent’s sanctimonious wisdom. But Chagall and Rothko could not obtain even her angry upbraiding. To the inhabitants of the Pale, the country had nothing to say.
A wry love, a twisted smile, a strange, unhappy happiness: these were the expressions they turned toward Russia. Knowing their affection to be unrequited, they spoke of home with the proprietary, mock-despairing tenderness Zora Neale Hurston adopted to address Black Americans in “My People! My People!” a critical but loving section of her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road. Chagall wrote about his birthplace with a similar fond disparagement. The town was “boring,” but “like no other”; a place he remembered, if unwillingly, “with emotion.” “Enough of Vitebsk. It is finished,” he announces near the close of his life story—then resurrects the city’s spires and rooftops as the horizon line of his many-colored canvases. Dvinsk was darker for Rothko, a pit dug in forest earth. Nonetheless, as James Breslin notes in his biography, the artist “never felt entirely at home” in Portland or New York. The work of both painters reconciles the limbo of being born Jewish in Russia into expectancy. Indecision becomes transformative: here if nowhere else, social uncertainty and emotional ambivalence translate into tensile balance. Rothko’s shimmering deracinated rectangles equivocate between surface and depth only to keep you poised upon their threshold. Wavering between earth and sky, the hovering figures of Chagall’s canvases remain poised in hesitant permanency at the horizon.
Eventually, the stained glass of Moische Segal, naturalized Frenchman, be-jeweled cathedrals in Europe and synagogues in the United States and Israel. Chagall crafted tapestries to adorn the Knesset and painted a dream of blue and gold and crimson on the ceiling of the Paris Opera. Marcus Rothkowitz, new American, but also “the last rabbi of western art” as Breslin notes, citing Stanley Kunitz’s affectionate label, painted and repainted the large abstracts he insisted upon hanging himself, crafting a signature aesthetic that elevated painting to the “level of poignancy” he heard in the Mozart piano concertos and symphonies that played in his studio. Paint was to Rothko what song is to the cantor: the language through which the spirit speaks. His canvases are secular prayers, their radiant translucency the instrument of expression rather than its end. Rothko judged the most compelling work that which “expresses more of what one thinks than of what one sees,” Breslin recounts. To look—really look—at one of the artist’s works is to see through the painting to the emotional understanding that gives it shape. For all their bright sensuality, even the early canvases possess an inward austerity, a contemplative quality the comparable work of Clifford Still or Joan Miró rarely produces. The arid beauty of Rothko’s later work—the series of canvases he created for Harvard University, those designed for the Four Seasons Restaurant in New York City, and the paintings he installed at the site in Houston that would become known as the Rothko Chapel—describes a place akin to the land Genesis evokes.
Israeli American writer Naama Goldstein echoes Rothko’s spatial logic in The Place Will Comfort You, a collection of short stories whose title could introduce any number of his canvases. “The first time I set foot there,” a character Yona writes of the settlement town Margoah, north of Jerusalem, “I thought I was on the moon. I said so. But the point is, no, exactly the opposite. The point is you’re exactly where you belong. . . . Sure, you’re small, but you’re a comma, you’re a period, you’re a necessary part. . . . You see exactly where you are, and what you are, what you’ve come from and what you’re bringing about. Like Avraham in his time, the same comprehension.” Rothko’s paintings drive toward a similar ontology. Afterimages, residual traces, they muse upon that early union with the unseen world, Abraham’s desire to hurry back “to the place where he had stood before the Lord.” Rothko refused Judaism, but like the dim light of constellations we see best from the periphery of the retina, the shimmering dark of his paintings offers the clarity of his averted vision.
On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Chagall painted the town red—literally—mobilizing artists and craftsmen until the walls of his hometown danced with his “multicolored animals.” But he appropriated the iconography of the Revolution as much to express defiance toward the settled order of Vitebsk’s traditional Judaism as toward the tsarist regime. The green cows and flying horses he pridefully describes in My Life as “swollen with Revolution” did not impress Communist leaders, who wondered what such surrealism had to do with Marx and Lenin. They were right. In truth, the artist was rebelling against the earthbound figures of Moscow’s “old Jewish theatre,” that Yiddish drama of “psychological naturalism and its false beards,” just as he had earlier defied the old-fashioned faith of Vitebsk rabbis. Rebellious graffiti artist, Chagall splashed the unadorned walls of the town’s Jewish homes with brilliant paint. “I turned the world upside down in my art like Lenin did Russia,” he insists in My Life. Rather than work toward the Bolshevik political ideal, Chagall exploited its iconography to inaugurate a new world in his art. Ever the maverick, he turned his defiant energy upon aesthetics just as Lenin exerted his own will upon political life.
Even after his death he did not return
To the city that nursed him.
Going away, this man did not look back.
To him I sing this song.
Torches, night, a last embrace,
Outside in her streets the mob howling.
He sent her a curse from hell
And in heaven could not forget her.
But never, in a penitent’s shirt,
Did he walk barefoot with lighted candle
Through his beloved Florence,
Perfidious, base, and irremediably home.
—Stanley Kunitz, “Dante,” from Anna Akhmatova
Strangers to the Russian Church and estranged from temple, Chagall and Rothko viewed their work through the lens of a separation sharp-edged with defiance. Rothko’s father left Russia three years in advance of his wife and children but died just six months after being reunited with them in Portland, Oregon. For the rest of his life, Rothko refused to revisit the land that had precipitated this abandonment. Though he made three extensive trips through Europe, he never set foot on Russian soil again. Nor did its cityscapes and landscapes appear even in his earliest figurative canvases. He painted his mother as strong, unyielding, and melancholy. He painted his father not at all. Like the darkness that supported the shimmering bands of color in his work, Dvinsk was a force no less sorrowfully present for its willed absence.
Chagall, on the other hand, left his parents and siblings behind when he traveled to Paris in 1922 with Bella. He spent the next six decades in Europe, save for a sojourn in New York City during the Holocaust. My Life, the memoir he finished before leaving Moscow, is parti-colored as his canvases, by turns affectionate and sad, scornful and sure, but sustained always by longing. At its close, Chagall confesses an exile’s spurned love. “Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. I am a stranger to them.” Unlike Lot’s wife, the artist did not hesitate before the vision of home passed from his view. But it is Akhmatova’s Dante this painter most closely resembles. Insulted as a Jew in Russia, it is still Russia to whom he gives his final word: “I shall come with my wife, my child. I shall lie down near you. And, perhaps, Europe will love me and, with her, my Russia.”
Going away, this man did not look back. Yet if he turned toward Europe, the proprietary caress of the closing line of My Life is more binding than a backward glance. Throughout the course of a long life, Chagall would travel to France and Germany, Mexico and Switzerland, Italy and Scotland. He would walk through Jerusalem, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, and New York. In 1973, a half century after his leave-taking, he would see Moscow and Leningrad once more. But the face of Vitebsk—“perfidious, base, and irremediably home”—he refused to look upon. Still, in his dream-paintings we recognize the city that nursed him, the place he could not forget, the beloved horizon of home in which he recognized not “pain,” not “terror,” but “strangest triumph.”