An exhibition of work by the artist Chagall shows the complexity of the wandering master, writes Dan Carrier

VARIAN Fry had an important mission to accomplish and time was running out. He had been sent to occupied France with a brief: Stop some of the country’s best-known artists falling into the clutches of the enemy. Use any means necessary to get them to America.
On his list was artist Marc Chagall, the Russian-born émigré who had settled in France. But he had a problem. Despite the German occupation, Chagall was convinced he was safe.
Chagall’s biographer Monica Bohm-Duchen, who lives in Gayton Road, Hampstead, and has written a guide for a new show of his work at the Ben-Uri Gallery in Swiss Cottage, says the artist was curiously unaware of the danger he was in.
She says: “In early 1940, just before the German invasion, the Chagall’s retreated to the remote and unspoilt Provencal village of Gordes, where he and his wife Bella were to live for a year. So impervious did Chagall seem to the dangers of remaining in France, he bought the house he was renting on the day the Germans invaded Belgium and Holland.” Ignoring the political turmoil and enthused by the Provencal spring, he busied himself painting landscapes and still lifes confident that moving from Paris to the countryside would be enough to allow him to continue to work in peace. And this, says Mrs Bohm-Duchen, is where Fry stepped in. The 32-year-old journalist, who had volunteered to go to Europe for a privately funded relief organisation called the Emergency Rescue Committee, thought otherwise. He had information that Chagall’s name, along with others including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were on a top secret Gestapo hit list. He spent the following year criss-crossing the country to find the artists and persuade him to leave. He gave them cash and advice on how to get a safe passage out of the country. But for Fry’s actions, Chagall, who painted right up to his death aged 97 in 1985, may not have survived.
Mrs Bohm-Duchen continues: “In late 1940 a big American car swept into the little village where he lived carrying Fry and the American vice-consul in Marseille. They brought with them an invitation to come to the States.
“But he was unimpressed. He was a French citizen and was he not too famous for the Germans to lay their hands on him? The overwhelming danger presented by the mere fact of is Jewishness seems hardly to have registered.”
But when France adopted anti-semitic laws and Chagall was arrested at a Marseille hotel he realised how grave the situation had become. They slipped over the border to Spain.
Mrs Bohm-Duchen first wrote about Chagall in 1985. An art historian, she collated notes on works shown by the Royal Academy. She found him fascinating – and in 1998, turned her attention to writing a comprehensive biography of his life.
But, she says, to consider Chagall as only a painter of Jewish works fails to understand his place in the canon of 20th century modernism – and misunderstands his own views towards his background.
She says: “Although he was very conscious of his Jewishness – his pictures often focus on life in Russia, where he grew up, and Biblical scenes – he did not want to be pigeon holed.”
“His Chassidic background comes across: There is an emphasis on his instinctive nature – his pictures are a celebration of Judaism, they feature lots of action, movement and are quite joyful while others are more mournful.
“However he would always say: we are citizens of the world. Lots of his work has nothing at all to do with the Jewish experience.”
Chagall, born Moyshe Shagal in 1887, came from Vitebsk, in Bellarussia. His father worked selling pickled herrings, while his mother ran a grocery store. It was a town with a large Jewish population – 50 per cent of the inhabitants were practising Jews – and despite his later depictions of rural Jewish peasantry that is supposedly drawn on his early years, Vitebsk was a large urban centre, with industry that grew rapidly when Chagall was a boy due to the construction of a major railway hub in the town. Mrs Bohm-Duchen explains that his rural depictions show a romanticised consideration of his background. She says: “He liked to think of himself as a poet who used paint – and in his paintings he used a poetic licence.”
She adds that he often took on iconic Jewish themes – but he didn’t just concentrate on stereotypically ‘Jewish’ subjects. “He was influenced by Cubism and other Paris schools of art,” she says. “He is as well known for his portraits, his studies of animals and landscapes.”
Chagall’s international, non-religious outlook was partly prompted by his nomadic existence – although he was born in Vitebsk he left for St Petersburg in his late teens and then headed to both Berlin and Paris, and also spent time in America and Mexico. He was caught in Russia when World War I started, after leaving Paris for three months to visit his family. It meant he played a role in the Russian revolution – ‘he found it hugely exciting and worked for the new government as an art commissar’, explains Mrs Bohm-Duchon – before heading back to Paris in the early 20s. He quickly immersed himself in the cultural melee of post-war France.
But many people in France did not always like what Chagall offered. Publisher Ambroise Vollard caused uproar when he decided to re-print the fables of the 17th-century poet Jean de la Fontaine, with Chagall as illustrator.
Mrs Bohm-Duchen explains: “Post war France was chauvinistic. How scandalous, it was argued, to commission a foreigner, a Russian Jew at that, to illustrate that enduring and quintessential classic of French literature. The affair was even debated in the Chamber of Deputies, where Chagall was described as a Vitebsk sign painter.”
And this, according to Mrs Bohm-Duchen, was a contradiction to Chagall’s feeling for his adopted country. She adds: “No where is the flowering of Jewish talent in the visual arts more striking than early 20th-century Paris.
“The city represented artistic freedom and religious and political freedom also. Chagall described it as lumiere-liberte – the light of freedom.”
So the exhibition has wisps of his religious and ethnic roots; but it is much more than that. “Above all, it is a great collection of work done by one of the leading artists of the 20th century,” Mrs Bohm-Duchen says.

• Chagall and his Circle runs until 24 July at the Ben-Uri Gallery, Boundary Road. Tel: 020 7604 3991.

• Chagall, by Monica Bohm-Duchen. Published by Phaidon, £12.99, and is available for £10 at the gallery during the exhibition.