I confess that I am not a big fan of Marc Chagall’s art, and I’ve never quite understood his popularity.
Nevertheless, I’m writing about Paris Through The Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle, which opens on Tuesday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art anyway. That’s because I am interested in the cross-fertilization artists experience, particularly at artists’ colonies (see an old NYTimes article of mine), and the Philadelphia show also explores La Ruche — “the beehive” — at left.
La Ruche was the three-story cylindrical building in Montparnasse, Paris, that many artists of the early 20th century called home. Chagall moved there soon after arriving in Paris in 1911, and worked there too.
La Ruche was founded in 1902 by French sculptor Alfred Boucher, but it soon became the hive of Eastern European artists, though not exclusively. At one time or another, the rolls included Archipenko, Kisling, Lipchitz, Soutine, Leger, Zadkine, Pechstein, Leger, Brancusi, Rivera, Modigliani, Delaunay, and others.
Must have been quite a place. World War II killed it, though.
In Philadelphia, the show is not a history of La Ruche, but the museum says it has explored creative exchanges that took place in the 1910s and 1920s among the artists who knew Chagall. They all mixed elements of cubism with their own folk traditions.
La Ruche had its own exhibition schedule, and Chagall, the museum says in its press release, once said, “In La Ruche, you either came out dead or famous.”
Paris Through the Window is representative of another trend at museums: though a few key works are borrowed — including the titular one, which comes from the Guggenheim Museum — most are drawn from the Philadelphia museum’s permanent collection. The economy bites.
Nothing wrong with that, btw. If the show’s advanced billing is correct, it looks as if the museum did a fine job of it.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum (bottom)