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NEW COLLECTIONS: SPRING 2022
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Poems from this week's featured book:
CHAGALL'S CIRCUS by William Bedford
CHAGALL'S CIRCUS by William Bedford
Marc Chagall’s work is often autobiographical. From pre-Soviet Russia to the painter’s final years in France, his paintings provided witness to the history of twentieth century political and creative turmoil. In Chagall’s Circus, William Bedford reflects on that huge imaginative endeavour. More about William Bedford and 'Chagall's Circus' is here.
Two poems from 'Chagall's Circus'
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.TO MY BETROTHED (1911)
From CHAGALL'S CIRCUS by William Bedford ‘My art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water.’ —Chagall. They did not want me to show my betrothed, those chittering old men of the spring salon. ‘She is a snake, spitting in his face,’ they said, as though a woman cannot be a snake. ‘And the man has the head of a bull!’ they cried, as though Pasiphaë never fell for a bull and Picasso stayed at home in Malaga. Yes, the man has the head of a bull, and the girl wraps herself round his shoulder. You can see that any night in Montmartre, the coffee house literati enjoying their absinthe, the poets and painters giving life to the myths. Is it any less true than my regrettable poverty? All I could buy was a market cucumber, and a herring on Fridays, like my father Sachar. One day I ate the head, the next day I ate the tail. But I talked with Gauguin and Kandinsky, I studied Van Gogh and Matisse, I saw Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet. The chittering men forget the man in my painting: while the woman is spitting in his face, he grasps at her leg with a gesture of desire. He is not living on cucumbers and herrings. My art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water. They will never see that in the spring salon |
CEMETERY GATES (1917)
From CHAGALL'S CIRCUS by William Bedford ‘Clad in a Russian smock, a leather briefcase under my arm, I gave the perfect impression of a Soviet functionary.’ —Chagall. Ten days that shook the world shook me, and Russia thick with ice turned upside down, Lenin’s Dervish dance of words a rhetoric of Red! and Red! and Red! . . . blood’s whine. The crème of Russia’s avant-garde fled. To Vitebsk! To art-for-art and Revolution. Who would have believed? Nobody sane. They kicked me out in a palace revolution, but bureaucrats do not forget. File names. The Bolsheviks took Russia out of war, and I took Hebrew for my Cemetery Gates: ‘Thus saith the Lord God: Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.’ It wasn’t blasphemy, in atheist Russia, Ezekiel’s wasted words. It wasn’t true, either, or Red! and Red! and Red! The Bolsheviks gave equal rights to Jews. |