Art, Life & Love

In a paneled lecture room at the University of Chicago one day last week, a pink-cheeked, wispy-haired little man mounted the raised platform, pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up on to his forehead and began to speak. He was not comfortable. "I do not feel at ease when I have to speak," said Painter Marc Chagall. "My language is the eye."

In ten days in Chicago, Marc Chagall, who ranks with Braque, Matisse and Picasso in the history of modern art, spoke (in French, through an interpreter) perhaps more about art and about himself than ever before. Invited by the Committee on Social Thought, an organization that aims to further intellectual awareness in America (previous guests: T. S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, Arnold Toynbee), visiting Professor Chagall was listed to speak on "Art and Life." To this son of an illiterate Russian barrelmaker who has been a refugee from both Communism and Naziism, art and life are synonymous, and both require only love. "Without love," his students heard, "an art is not art, and a life is not life." Chagall ranged wide over his broad subject. Samples: P:On judgment of art: "It is better for the public to judge the artist according to his work, because the artist himself doesn't know himself. The mirror of the artist is his work."

P:On how he works: "I get up each day, and I have no idea of what I'm going to do. I'm very worried. Then I work. Then I go to bed and still worry and say I haven't worked enough. It's always the same."

P:On the U.S.: "If I were a young man and were beginning my life over, perhaps I would plant myself in America because I believe in the future of America and I love this country. I love faith, goodness and kindness, which are so needed all over the world, and these things cannot make their mark here unless they are translated into the art and culture of America."

To supplement the words of Chagall, the University of Chicago hung some 40 of his atmospheric, richly colored works, all borrowed from Chicago area owners, in its Goodspeed Hall. The Chicago appearance was part of a full 70th year for Painter Chagall. Last month Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art staged an extensive exhibit of his work; two new incisive books have been published, Marc Chagall: His Graphic Work, edited by Franz Meyer (Harry N. Abrams; $12.50), and Marc Chagall, by Walter Erben (Praeger; $7.50).

To go through the discomfort of appearing as a lecturer, the painter had to interrupt a number of projects he had been working on at his studio on the French Riviera, including sets and costumes for the ballet Daphnis and Chloe, illustrations for the book version and new stained-glass windows for Metz's 13th century cathedral, damaged by Nazi bombs. But to Marc Chagall, all this did not seem enough. "It seems to me that I am just beginning," he said. "It seems that I have done very little in life."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.