Palazzo Roverella (Rovigo) from September 2020 offers a new, important monographic exhibition on Marc Chagall.
An exemplary selection of over one hundred works, about 70 paintings on canvas and paper as well as the two extraordinary series of engravings and etchings published in the first years away from Russia, "Ma Vie", 20 tables that illuminate his precocious and painful autobiography , and Gogol's "Dead Souls", the deepest insight into the Russian soul of great literature.
The works that will be exhibited at Palazzo Roverella come not only from the artist's heirs, with a vast and generous loan, but also from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg, the Pompidou in Paris, the Thyssen Bornemisza in Madrid and from the Kunstmuseum of Zurich and from important and historic private collections, with some of the greatest masterpieces from the "Promenade" to the "Jew in Pink", to "The Wedding", "The Rooster", "Black Glove" and others.
An important exhibition, with a precise museum structure, which does not intend to tell "a little about everything" but chooses a precise theme and explores it in depth through a selection of its essential masterpieces.
The theme on which the curator Claudia Zevi has chosen to compete is that of the influence that Russian popular culture has had on all of Chagall's work, with a greater realistic impact when he lived in Russia in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, but equally overwhelmingly, in the figures of animals, houses and villages, always present in the paintings of his long following years in Paris, in America, in the south of France.
This exhibition intends to analyze in a broad and perfectly documented way the other breeding ground of the artist's iconography, that is the popular tradition of deep Russia. An iconography made of religiosity, in which we find echoes of the religious iconography stratified in the popular icons and cartoons of the lubki whose characters such as the rooster, the goats and the cows that populated the daily life of the Russian villages, we will also find in the late works by Chagall.
These elements are metamorphosed in Chagall's work in a sort of poetic realism which draws its expressive syntax from the tradition of Russian fairy tales, while its intellectual and spiritual figure derives from the Jewish and Orthodox Christian world.
The reworking, implemented through the threads of his memory, of Russian popular culture with its wealth of images and legends, combined with the fantastic mysticism of the Hasidic tradition, will come to constitute the specific paraphernalia which the artist will always use, in the course of his long life, to define a language that still today is able to communicate like few others with our postmodern sensibility.
In his works memories become "presences", they populate his paintings appearing even where you don't expect them, such as goats or isbas inserted in the representation of a bouquet which is in turn composed of flowers and visions.
This exhibition also intends to question the theme of the singular position that Chagall occupies in the history of XNUMXth century art.
Without ever getting confused with the avant-garde debate, his painting nevertheless always remains open to the needs of modernism, but without requiring any break with the world of memory and traditional forms. In his extraordinary and very original work, the utopian need of the avant-garde is never lacking, without ever interfering with the world of emotions and affectivity, which become, in his work, an element of enrichment and very original formal definition.
And so, while choosing to live, as he himself says, 'turning his back on the future', Chagall finds himself having codified a language and an expressive syntax that will survive, much more than the traditional avant-gardes of the 900s, the passage of time and the change in the political and social situations of the twentieth century.
And in all of this, Russia remains the place of roots, of the memory of a love that feels disappointed and dreams of being able to come true.
"Even my Russia will love me", are the words with which he concludes "Ma Vie", the illustrated autobiography that Chagall published, just thirty-four, in Berlin at the beginning of his exile, aware that this time the separation from Russia would have been definitive.
The exhibition, which will make use of the collaboration of the Culture Musei Foundation and the Lugano Museum of Cultures, is accompanied by a rich catalog - edited by Claudia Zevi - published by Silvana Editoriale, with essays by Maria Chiara Pesenti, Giulio Busi, Michel Draguet and Claudia Zevi.
19 September 2020 – 17 January 2021 Rovigo, Palazzo Roverella – MARC CHAGALL “even my Russia will love me”
