Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Marc Chagall
French, Russian; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
49%
Temptation. 1912. Oil on canvas
Far from being “wholly free from self-conscious striving” (as Meyer Schapiro thought of Chagall's biblical prints from several decades later), this Temptation exhibits what must be among the most heretical misunderstandings of Cubism from the movement's heyday. Chagall's typically dulcet colors are nauseating here, hovering like smog around figures that appear sealed off from them. Chagall was always a linear painter, but typically more deft and sparing with his lines than arch-cubism allowed him to be: the style was something he needed to work through so as to disavow. The faceting up of Temptation meant a profusion of lines knocking his colors about and squaring them off against each other. Adam and Eve look plopped into the scene rather than imbued with it. If “what is beautiful” in the later illustrations “does not spring from a will to novel forms” (Schapiro again), Temptation fails on account of its studied novelty. (2023)