Whenever Chagall’s work is exhibited in Eastern Europe, it produces feelings of sad sweetness for those who know his life story. So much of his art was an expression of longing for his home, Vitebsk, in the northwestern region of the former Russian Empire. Chagall mythologized Vitebsk and escaped from it twice. The first time was in 1910, when he was 23 and went to Paris in order to develop his talent. In 1914, he returned home because his sister was getting married. Shortly after that, with the onset of World War I, followed by the Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war, the borders closed and he remained there for eight years, even serving in a governmental job as “Provisional Plenipotentiary for the Affairs of Art.” But in 1922, when he saw himself dangerously out of step with the Soviets, he fled with his young family. “I am an alien to them,” Chagall reflected in his autobiography, and it was true since he was constitutionally unphilosophical and non-doctrinaire.
After that, Chagall never returned to the region of his birth. But in the mid-1930s he spent time in the Lithuanian city of Vilnius (Wilno in Polish, Vilna in Yiddish), a center of Yiddish culture (soon to be annihilated by the Nazis) about 230 miles to the west of Vitebsk. The human scale of the vistas and church steeples, the painted houses and winding streets, and the interior of its Great Synagogue, decorated with evocative lions and doves, reminded him of home. Over the years, he returned to Vilnius many times, producing evocative works of the synagogue and other landmarks.
This summer, Vilnius’s Museum of Applied Arts and Design, a branch of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, has presented “Chagall, Picasso, Ernst: Ceramics and Tapestries,” a lyrically designed show that will be on view until September 30. Displaying 12 tapestries and 25 ceramic works, the exhibit was conceived by Meret Meyer, Chagall’s granddaughter, who suggested that an exhibit of decorative art by those three great Modernists would fit well in the Lithuanian museum’s space.
Installation view showing tapestries by Yvette Cauquil-Prince based on, from left, Chagall’s Head of Moses, The Creation and Peace (Credit: The Museum of Applied Arts and Design of the LNMA, Vilnius, LT. Photos by Gintarė Grigėnaitė).
The show is dominated by Chagall, with nine tapestries based on his paintings, all of them executed in the workshop of master weaver Yvette Cauquil-Prince, who was born in Belgium in 1926 and died in France in 2005. Cauquil-Prince was a carrier of the grand tradition of Flemish and French tapestry, translating it for a modern audience through her collaboration with an array of artists from her time, adapting their designs and adjusting their colors to the tonality of her dyes. The exhibition also includes her splendid reinterpretation of Picasso’s heroic Minotauromachy and The Remains of the Minotaur in Harlequin Costume, as well as Max Ernst’s The Eye of Silence, his allegory of the blind eye Europe turned toward the human suffering that occurred during World War II and the Holocaust. All of the tapestries in the exhibition have been installed so that they seem to defy gravity, suspended from the ceiling or floating off the walls, weightless and free like the unanchored elements in a Chagall painting. The 25 ceramic pieces—24 small plaques, plates and vessels by Chagall and a single plate by Picasso—are displayed under glass in brightly lit museum cabinets colored in a burnt-orange hue, from which the white earthenware pieces seem to bloom like flowers.
After World War II, with the restoration of order and with their reputations soaring, all three of the artists—Chagall, Picasso and Ernst—who were known primarily as painters, experimented with a range of other media, adapting their ideas in new and dynamic ways. From 1948 through 1952, Chagall and Picasso, both living on the French Riviera, worked with Georges and Suzanne Ramié at their Madoura pottery workshop in Vallauris. Chagall was inspired by the opportunity: “I have wanted to use this earth like the old artisans, breathing into it the echo of an art that is near and at the same time distant.” With practice, he found he could reshape a traditional jug, stretching it to resemble a woman’s torso with a rounded arm, or the figure of a beast that might be a lion or a goat. He enjoyed the reflective variations of the glazes as well as the surprising unpredictability of the colors. Picasso was drawn to memories of his native Spain as he worked in the intense Mediterranean light and decorated many of his plates with images of bulls and bullfights.
Yvette Cauquil-Prince’s tapestries are massive and demonstrate her virtuosity through the many stages of artistic interpretation, beginning with her sketches and leading to the detailed and intricate format of her cartoons (working designs), the skillful feathering of her edges and her masterful modulation of tones. You see this expertise particularly in her 1993 adaptation of Chagall’s 1933 Harlequins, in which whole areas of the weaving—the space surrounding the upside-down acrobat, for instance—give the impression of brushstrokes. She was particularly close to Chagall and over the decades developed 40 tapestries based on his art. The Peace, her 1993 adaptation of the famous stained-glass work that Chagall created for the United Nations in 1963, stands out in the exhibition, not only because of its monumental size, approximately thirteen and a half feet in height by more than twenty feet across, but because of its theme.
This summer, with ongoing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the tapestry elicits a sorrowful resonance, linking it back to its inception. Chagall’s original stained-glass composition was intended as a memorial to the diplomat and second deputy director of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld, who died with 15 other UN staffers when the plane they were on crashed over Northern Rhodesia. They were on a mission to mediate with the opposing parties in a civil war there. In the middle of the Cold War, his death came as a shock to the world on the scale of the assassination of Rabin in Israel in our own time. The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Hammarskjöld’s death is an incalculable loss. He had built himself and his office into one of the great hopes for world peace. He came to represent what was honorable and rational in a chaotic world full of hate and suspicion.”
Characteristically, Chagall chose to honor Hammarskjöld primarily through poetic images of peace and joy, even referencing Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony through the inclusion of a few notes from the score, which was purportedly Hammarskjöld’s favorite piece of music. As many critics have pointed out, the original conception was less a memorial to Hammarskjöld and more an artistic ode to light. Masters of stained glass Charles Marq and Jacques Simon collaborated with Chagall, guiding the project so that the artist’s blues and reds and greens were enlivened and intensified through light.
Ceramic plates by Marc Chagall: From left, Woman on a White Horse, 1952; The Crowned Bird, 1953; Profiles of David and Bathsheba, 1951 (Credit: The Museum of Applied Arts and Design of the LNMA, Vilnius, LT. Photos by Gintarė Grigėnaitė).
For the tapestry, Cauquil-Prince worked off Chagall’s preparatory gouache for the stained glass. The artistic conception must have been daunting, with the work’s swirl of movement and vast cast of characters—donkeys, roosters, lions, snakes, angels, mothers holding children, women brandishing bouquets, Christ on the Cross with his followers, as well as the Hebrew prophet Isaiah. The other challenge for Cauquil-Prince was to translate from a medium that flourishes because of the glow of transmitted light to one that absorbs light, allowing color to be deepened and amplified in the opposite direction, while also inviting touch. In that respect, the work is a total success, catching detail and sustaining the whimsy of Chagall’s genius while introducing an intimacy that warms the exhibition hall.
With war not too far from Lithuania’s borders, the hopefulness emanating from the warmth and tactile nature of the tapestries and the vibrant ceramics provides much needed comfort.
Top image: Installation view focusing on tapestries by Yvette Cauquil-Prince based on Chagall’s The Black Glove (left) and Harlequins (Credit: The Museum of Applied Arts and Design of the LNMA, Vilnius, LT.
Photos by Gintarė Grigėnaitė).