Exhibit of the week: Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Through July 10

Maybe we over-romanticize history’s artist communities, said Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post. In depicting early-20th-century Paris as a hub of artistic crossbreeding, this exhibit in Philadelphia unwittingly tells a cautionary tale about groupthink. From 1910 to ’14, Russian native Marc Chagall lived at a Paris studio building called the Beehive with a coterie of immigrant artists, who grappled, sometimes clumsily, with the styles du jour. Half-baked cubism? See the gratuitously deconstructed pears in Chagall’s otherwise intriguing Half-Past Three (The Poet). Candy-coated surrealism? Try his later The Watering Trough, starring a pig sporting “the Mona Lisa smile” that makes so many of Chagall’s animals into sentimental cartoons. And lesser artists fared worse: Woman at the Piano, an insipid cubist portrait by Albert Gleizes, “should have gone straight to poster art like some films go straight to video.” By the last room, you may wonder if Chagall and his Beehive housemates would’ve been better off working in isolation.

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Well, no one creates art in a vacuum, said Joann Loviglio in the Associated Press. When Chagall came to Paris from provincial Vitebsk, he was 23 and fresh from art school. It’s no surprise that this impressionable young outsider was eager to explore voguish ideas. The exhilaration of taking on the big city is palpable in Paris Through the Window, a “dream-like and colorful interpretation” of the swirling urban vitality he and his peers were exposed to from their studio perches. Unfortunately for Chagall, he was cut off from this hothouse of ideas too soon: During what was meant to be a brief trip home, he was trapped in Russia by World War I’s outbreak and then the Bolshevik revolution. The works from that period shown here are noticeably darker, when they’re not joyously recalling his Vitebsk childhood.

This show isn’t even all about Chagall, said Edward Sozanski in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Only a third of the works are his; the others provide a welcome reminder of “how richly diverse the modernist ferment was” that produced Picasso, Miró, and Gris. By ignoring those headline-grabbers and instead focusing on Chagall and other expats from Russia and Eastern Europe, Paris Through a Window makes us see how much marvel­ous imagery from the period we’ve missed. In this era, when artists might be tempted to communicate electronically, it makes you worry that culture’s great leaps “happen best when artists are working side by side.”