MARC CHAGALL AND THE SUPREMACY OF BLUE
Hilary Hope Guise, professor of art history, Florida State University, United States of America
Thursday 21–Friday 22 January 1.00 pm COURSE FEES R230; Staff and students R115
Chagall’s floating dreamers, brides and lovers exist in a rootless universe where gravity has no pull and there are no sure foundations. The echoes of the Russian shtetl in the Pale of Settlement are never far away, even long after the destruction of Chagall’s birth city in Belarus. ‘My homeland exists only in my soul,’ he said, and Chagall’s only recourse was to trust in the narratives of his ancient people and draw on the strength of his God.
His early leanings towards Cubism in Paris gave way to a more narrative style culminating in his great Old Testament paintings of the 1960s in which ultramarine dominates. The colour of wisdom and the cosmos, blue unified his later vision. His Biblical etchings and monumental paintings established him as one of the great interpreters of Scripture, while his stained-glass windows became an enduring sign of the supremacy of blue. Chagall’s ever-present sense of loss resurfaces in dreamlike childhood memories drawing on his Hassidic Russian Jewish roots. Saved from Nazi persecution by a daring rescue from France, he remained throughout his life the quintessential alien in exile.
Lecture titles
1. Marc Chagall – an alien in exile
2. Marc Chagall – and the supremacy of blue
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