World Notes ART

Through wind and rain for up to six hours, hundreds of Muscovites waited last week outside the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum. Two years after his death and following more than half a century of official neglect, Marc Chagall was being honored in his native land with a major retrospective. Neither the artist's dreamy images of village life nor his Jewish themes endeared him to Soviet authorities. After Chagall went into voluntary exile in France in 1922, many of the works he had left behind were banished to museum storerooms.

Last week's exhibition brought those works into public view, marking another milestone in Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost campaign. "Heavenly things," said Valentina Chagall upon catching her first look at some of her husband's earliest paintings. "My only regret is that he could not be here."