Chagall At The Liverpool Tate

Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love. MARC CHAGALL

Last September we went to the UK's first major Chagall exhibition in fifteen years at the Liverpool Tate. We were overwhelmed by the colour and vibrancy of the paintings, and their visceral and emotional immediacy, and how they exceeded one hundredfold the reproductions we'd been admiring in books and on postcards and via computer images for so long. There's simply no substitute for the real-life exhibit or performance, whether it be a painting, sculptural work or piece of music. We stood before The Poet Reclining . . .

. . .  and The Promenade . . .

. . . and wondered, and were amazed, and felt extremely happy.

I've been reading Chagall's poetic, impressionistic, concisely-written 1922 memoir, My Life. It's wonderful. This, from the early pages, about his childhood town (his shtetl, he was a Russian Jew) of Vitebsk (now in Belarus):

In those days there was still no cinema. People went home or to the shop. That's what I remember . . . I say nothing of the sky and stars of my childhood. They are my stars, my sweet stars; they accompany me to school and wait for me in the street till I return. Poor things, forgive me. I have left you alone up there at such a dizzy height! My sad, my joyful town! As a boy, I would watch you from our doorstep, childlike. To a child's eyes you were so dear. When the fence blocked my view, I would climb on to a little wooden post. If I still could not see you, I would climb up on to the roof. Why not? Grandfather used to climb there too. And I would gaze at you as long as I liked.

In Paris, between 1911 and 1914, Chagall discovered a lumière-liberté: light, colour, freedom, the sun, the joy of living! But he would always remain true to his Russian-Jewish homeland. He learnt from Fauvism and Cubism, but did not follow them. He has been called the father of Expressionism; he anticipated Surrealism. His varied pictures show aspects of all these movements, but Chagall never identified with any one school or style. His paintings are unique. They are naïve, narrational, mystical, lyrical, colourful, inward, visionary, subjective, anti-naturalist, anti-formalist, anti-intellectual, poetic, primitive, nostalgic, ambiguous, dreamlike, transcendent.     

Picasso painted with his belly and me, I paint with my heart. MARC CHAGALL

Day Tripper

To Liverpool to see the Chagall exhibition at the Tate. But first we just had to visit the most famous club in the world, the Cavern Club in Mathew Street. The Beatles played here nearly 300 times. It was dark, and rather forlorn, and the ghosts of the Fab Four and all those other great Liverpudlian groups from the 1960s were long gone. A lone singer sang and strummed guitar very loudly from a tiny stage under the rebuilt brick arches. A scattering of camera-wielding German and Japanese tourists sang along. 'I wanna hold your ha-aa-aaaand...'  

In the north-west corner of Albert Dock, not far from the  Merseyside Maritime Museum and the International Slavery Museum...

... lies the Liverpool Tate.

View of  Liverpool —  one of England's most architecturally vibrant cities — from a top-floor window in the Tate. The classically-inspired buildings at Pier Head, which you can see in the centre of the photo, are the Royal Liver Building, the Cunard Building and the Port of Liverpool Building: now known as 'The Three Graces'. The modern structure on the left is the Museum of Liverpool, opened in 2011. The black, wedge-shaped building on the right, made of granite and reflective glass, is part of the brand-new and highly controversial Mann Island development. These modernist blocks will house shops, offices, apartments and leisure outlets. The Latitude Building's resemblance to a coffin has been noted by many...

... though we thought that the Longitude Building, from this angle, looked like the prow of a large ship...