17 minute read
THE ELUSIVE MARC
ABRAHAM AND THREE ANGELS
LOVERS IN THE SKY OF NICE
Advertisement
a mere “Vitebsk sign painter,” to illustrate a masterpiece of French letters. But that blew over, and Chagall went on to do a series of resonant illustrations of the Bible for Vollard.
Increasingly alarmed by Nazi persecution of the Jews, Chagall made a strong political statement on canvas in 1938 with his White Crucifixion. Then 51 and in his artistic prime, he portrayed the crucified Christ, his loins covered with a prayer shawl, as a symbol of the suffering of all Jews. In the painting, a synagogue and houses are in flames, a fleeing Jew clutches a Torah to his breast, and emigrants try to escape in a rudimentary boat. Not long after, in June 1941, Chagall and his wife boarded a ship for the United States, settling in New York City. The six years Chagall spent in America were not his happiest. He never got used to the pace of New York life, never learned English. “It took me thirty years to learn bad French,” he said, “why should I try to learn English?” One of the things he did enjoy was strolling through Lower Manhattan, buying strudel and gefilte fish, and reading Yiddish newspapers. His palette during these years often darkened to a tragic tone, with depictions of a burning Vitebsk and fleeing rabbis. When Bella, his muse, confidante and best critic, died suddenly in 1944 of a viral infection at the age of 52, “everything turned black,” Chagall wrote.
After weeks of sitting in his apartment on Riverside Drive immersed in grief, tended to by his daughter, Ida, then 28 and married, he began to work again. Ida found a French-speaking English woman, Virginia McNeil, to be his housekeeper. A diplomat’s daughter and bright, rebellious and cosmopolitan, McNeil had been born in Paris and raised in Bolivia and Cuba, but had recently fallen on hard times. She was married to John McNeil, a Scottish painter who suffered from depression, and she had a five-year-old daughter, Jean, to support. She was 30 and Chagall 57 when they met, and before long the two were talking painting, then dining together. A few months later, Virginia left her husband and went with Chagall to live in High Falls, New York, a village in the Catskills. They bought a simple wooden house with an adjoining cottage for him to use as a studio.
Though Chagall would do several important public works in the United States—sets and costumes for a 1942 American Ballet Theatre production of Tchaikovsky’s Aleko
and a 1945 version of Stravinsky’s Firebird, and later large murals for Lincoln Center and stained-glass windows for the United Nations headquarters and the Art Institute of Chicago—he remained ambivalent about America. “I know I must live in France, but I don’t want to cut myself off from America,” he once said. “France is a picture already painted. America still has to be painted. Maybe that’s why I feel freer there. But when I work in America, it’s like shouting in a forest. There’s no echo.” In 1948 he returned to France with Virginia, their son, David, born in 1946, and Virginia’s daughter. They eventually settled in Provence, in the hilltop town of Vence. But Virginia chafed in her role, as she saw it, of “the wife of the Famous Artist, the charming hostess to Important People,” and abruptly left Chagall in 1951, taking the two children with her. Once again the resourceful Ida found her father a housekeeper— this time in the person of Valentina Brodsky, a 40- year-old Russian living in London. Chagall, then 65, and Vava, as she was known, soon married.
The new Mrs. Chagall managed her husband’s affairs with an iron hand. “She tended to cut him off from the world,” says David McNeil, 57, an author and songwriter who lives in Paris. “But he didn’t really mind, because what he needed most was a manager to give him peace and quiet so he could get on with his work. I never saw him answer a telephone himself. After Vava took over, I don’t think he ever saw his bank statements and didn’t realize how wealthy he was. He taught me to visit the Louvre on Sunday, when it was free, and he always picked up all the sugar cubes on the table before leaving a restaurant.” McNeil and his half sister, Ida, who died in 1994 at the age of 78, gradually found themselves seeing less of their father. But, to all appearances, Chagall’s married life was a contented one, and images of Vava appear in many of his paintings.
Chagall also produced lithographs, etchings, sculptures, ceramics, mosaics and tapestries. He also took on such demanding projects as designing stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre in Jerusalem. His ceiling for the Paris Opéra, painted in 1963-64 and peopled with Chagall angels, lovers, animals and Parisian monuments, provided a dramatic contrast to the pompous, academic painting and decoration in the rest of the Opéra.
“He prepared his charcoal pencils, holding them in his hand like a little bouquet,” McNeil wrote of his father’s working methods in a memoir that was published in France last spring. “Then he would sit in a large straw chair and look at the blank canvas or cardboard or sheet of paper, waiting for the idea to come. Suddenly he would raise the charcoal with his thumb and, very fast, start tracing straight lines, ovals, lozenges, finding an aesthetic structure in the incoherence. A clown would appear, a juggler, a horse, a violinist, spectators, as if by magic. When the outline was in place, he would back off and sit down, exhausted like
a boxer at the end of a round.”
Some critics said he drew badly. “Of course I draw badly,” Chagall once said. “I like drawing badly.” Perhaps worse, from the critics’ point of view, he did not fit easily into the accepted canon of modernity. “Impressionism and Cubism are foreign to me,” he wrote. “Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul... Let them eat their fill of their square pears on their triangular tables!”
Veteran art critic Pierre Schneider notes, “Chagall absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Expressionism and other modern art trends incredibly fast when he was starting out. But he used them only to suit his own aesthetic purposes. That makes it hard for art critics and historians to label him. He can’t be pigeonholed.”
When he died in Saint Paul de Vence on 28th March, 1985, at 97, Chagall was still working, still the avant-garde artist who refused to be modern. That was the way he said he wanted it: “To stay wild, untamed . . . to shout, weep, pray.” www.smithsonianmag.com
PARIS THROUGH THE WINDOW
Žarko Laušević, actor
GIVING UP IS THE EASIEST, BUT I DIDN’T WANT THAT
He could have been a writer and a painter, but instead he chose to be an actor who writes books that sell in many copies. In his revelation for CorD Magazine, he speaks for the first time about his childhood and upbringing, about the way he has restarted his life from scratch several times – when he came to Belgrade to study in 1978, completed college and started a new life. Then tragedy struck, and he found himself back at the start after being released from prison, and following the NATO bombing he left for New York – where he again found himself having to start from scratch. And that departure was the most painful.
Nothing more powerful and sensitive than actor Žarko Laušević appeared on the film and theatre scene of Yugoslavia during the 1980s. His every performance was worth remembering… and worthy of awards. He was 25 years when he gained huge popularity thanks to the television series Sivi Dom [Grey Home], and he was 27 when he won the 1987 Golden Arena award for the film Oficir s ružom [The Officer with a Rose] at the then Yugoslav Film Festival in Pula and Emperor Constantine in Niš. He was 30 when he was given the Sterija Award in Novi Sad for the characters of Rastko Nemanjić and Saint Sava in the play Saint Sava. He is also the recipient of the most awards at the festivals City Theatre in Budva, Grand Prix at the Film Meetings in Niš, Zoran Radmilović awards etc.
Žarko Laušević (61) was born in Cetinje and was 14 when he moved with his parents and siblings (one brother and one sister) to the then Titograd, today’s Podgorica. His father, Dušan, was a professor of history who went on to become the director of the State Museum of King Nikola in Cetinje. His mother, Roksanda, was a school secretary. The youngest of three children, he recalls a happy childhood and upbringing:
“If there’s anything that I remember with nostalgia from that time, then that would be the serenity of the family fortress. I don’t have the right to generalise, but our parents were dedicated guardians of the treasure of our family love and that implicit tenderness. I was also lucky in life to have great teachers who gave my guidance and showed me the patterns that shape future standards. And I don’t only mean those in the schools that I attended. And nor do mean only the wise people I’ve met. There are certainly also important books that are teachers, that shift your consciousness, light the path that you’ve intended to take and direction attention towards the signposts at the crossroads that you encounter on that path. Attention to peculiarity. I later searched constantly for that peculiarity in the things around me, and it is – if I may comment on myself – somehow dominant in my handwriting, but also in that which attracts me to acting. Write about the extraordinary… in an ordinary way. As an actor, choose the extreme traits of the character you’re portraying… and be vivacious. Transcribe from life.”
As a primary school pupil, he was somehow naturally instructed on obligatory school reading. However, his fondest memory from that period was one of his father’s recommendations. That was the book The Most Beautiful Legends of Classical Antiquity by Gustav Schwab (1792-1850). This collection of Greek and Roman stories relates to gods and people, while alongside historical revelations, it also represents a unique moral of good and evil:
“That book remained my obligatory reading for my entire life. I happily return to it even today and one of my children is very strongly attached to that book. That isn’t merely an issue of being familiar with the classics, but rather also something that forms respect… towards tradition, towards history, and ultimately, or initially, towards oneself. That’s how I experience it. Without being familiar with history, we can’t know ourselves.”
In those youthful days, his favourite music was that performed by Miladin Šobić, then a young Montenegrin singer-songwriter who would go on to cause a sensation on the Yugoslav music scene, before mysteriously disappearing from that scene. He had the privilege of listening to him perform in his flat, live!: “I still do so today, though unfortunately only through cassettes, or YouTube. I warmly recommend Miladin. That emotion still hasn’t re-emerged.”
Alongside his victory in the State Recital Competition, at the age of 16 he also became a member of the then newly established amateur theatre company “Dodest” (Dom omladine - drama experimental stage Titograd). That was the first indication that he could become an actor, but also that he could become a writer or a painter, as he is equally talented in those areas:
THE LAUŠEVIĆ FAMILY, CETINJE,1963
“I was courageous enough, I am able to say today, to try my hand, because I didn’t fear challenges. I had many complexes, who doesn’t have them? I had constant stage freight and blushed in front of a girl and before a performance. One day I would think that I was skinny, the next day that I was fat. I thought that I didn’t know how to speak, and today I’m still afraid to speak in front of a large number of people.
“I hid my ambitions at that time. I acted in one of the first Montenegrin TV dramas, back in 1978, with Petar Božović and Sonja Jauković, directed by our dear professor, Milo Đukanović, who later became much better known for directing the series Truckers [Kamiondžije], as well as for being a member of the Black Wave [film movement]. My father wanted me to attend the art academy, so he wasn’t really impressed by my acting debut. However, sometime later he consented and supported me for the rest of his life. My mother and sister, of course, knew about it and supported me, which continued throughout my entire life. Did acting intoxicate me? I don’t know, but it caused me to liberate myself, to find myself and to constantly search further. It’s a great thing when you pick a vocation that will fulfil you for the rest of your life, that you won’t hate and won’t think about retirement. It still fulfils me to this day.”
He enrolled in the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, in the class of Professor Miroslav Minja Dedić (1921-2015). The class also included Sonja Savić, Zoran Cvijanović, Svetislav Goncić, Branimir Brstina… The professor stayed in contact with all of them until his life ended on 1st March, 2015, the day when Žarko was aboard a plane travelling to Belgrade, where he was set to start work on shooting for the Miroslav Momčilović film A Stinky Fairytale [Smrdljiva bajka]. Today, as always, he chooses words of love and respect to describe him:
“Professor Dedić was an exceptional personality. We loved and were afraid of him at the same time, but I suppose that’s the very definition of authority. I think he had a decisive influence on all his students. Okay, not to generalise, he did on me. He compelled me to view everything I do through his prism, even today, after his departure. And I will never abandon that.”
Entering the acting ensemble of the Yugoslav Drama Theatre was a great privilege, an honour, and above all recognition for a young actor. Žarko was 22 when he became a permanent member of the most powerful Yugoslav theatre:
“At the beginning of my third year of acting studies, I was invited to the National Theatre by Mrs Vida Ognjenović, where she was the director of Drama and had started directing the play Gorski Vijenac [The Mountain Wreath]. I think the fact that she was also a lecturer at our college had a decisive influence on me receiving Professor Dedić’s consent for that engagement, because the school rule forbade students from working professionally until completion of, if I recall, the sixth semester. It was a small role, but apparently also big enough to ensure that, after the premiere of this most famous work of Njegoš, I was hired by Stevo Žigon for his next play, Romeo and Juliet. Theatre corridors then filled my head
with the notion that I had been envisaged as the lead, but Žigon assigned me the role of Juliet’s cousin, Tybalt. I wasn’t disappointed after the casting came out on the bulletin board, but rather decided to do my best. I started almost fanatically practising fencing, while at the same time preparing for an unusual stage element. Along the way, I directed all my strength to be able, with the incredible physical goal that I’d set for myself, to maintain maximum awareness regarding speaking tasks. Towards the end of the second act, I realised that my months of effort had paid off. After receiving the affections of the audience, despite playing a serious villain, I received applause on the open stage, and at the very end of the first part of the play, there was a unified murmur. That’s when Tybalt is slain by Romeo’s sword, and my Tybalt – after the directional shock on stage and the extraction of the extras and Romeo himself – stood for a short delay with both hands outstretched, holding a knife in one hand and the fencing foil in the other, fell like a monument being demolished, in one piece, on his back. That was no longer acting. It was fanaticism that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, in contradiction of any sporting fall, in contradiction of common sense. And in my mind was only the assumption that a man who dies no longer has common sense. The audience couldn’t believe it. I was rewarded with the most valuable praise for an actor – a long ovation and shouts of ‘bravo!’. If my start had been on those amateur boards at Dodest, back in 1976, I can consider that 1981 and the role of Tybalt as being my true professional beginning.”
That which Professor Dedić had marked in Žarko’s schooling continued to be done at the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, in a much more pragmatic way, by actor and director Stevo Žigon. Laušević today thinks that he couldn’t have had two better mentors during those years that are most critical for a young actor, when his quivering being is still struggling to make the right first step, and every step is on the red line:
“Žigon took me to the Yugoslav Drama Theatre, in his next directorial work. That was Dragan Tomić’s Raskršće [Junction]. It was also a junction for my life. In the mornings, during rehearsals for that play, I was guided by Žigon’s special instinct to uncover the secrets of the professional stage, while in the afternoons I would work on my graduation exam with Professor Dedić, a monodrama based on Njegoš’s The Ray of the Microcosm. When I look back today, that was perhaps the happiest and most fulfilling part of my
Fear is a common topic in my books. It seems to me today that fear is dominant in this society, and it’s as though I no longer see elementary civic courage
biography. The system of work that was then formed, together with two great artists, has remained at the essence of my acting to this day. Yes, after Raskršće I received a JDP scholarship and pledged my allegiance to the most splendid theatre in Yugoslavia.”
He was in his Jesus year [33] when drunken hooligans attacked him and his brother, Branimir, in front of the Epl café-bar in Podgorica, on 31st July 1993. Acting out of self-defence, he killed attackers Dragor Pejović and Radovan Vučinić, and ended up in prison in Spuž (Montenegro), then in the prison in Požarevac. He was initially sentenced to serve 15 years, but that was subsequently reduced to four years, and as Žarko had already served four years and seven months at that time, he was promptly released. He left the country shortly afterwards, moving to New York with his family.
And he started all over again:
“And I was ready for that, because I’d already started from scratch several times in my life. I started a new life when I came to Belgrade in 1978 to study, and I started a new life when I finished college. Then that tragedy struck, and after being released from prison I was at the beginning again. After the bombing, I went to New York – and started again. That departure was the most painful. I initially had indications of a possible film career in America, but a new court modification soon arrived that refuted the judgement of the federal institutions and passed a new verdict, which meant that I had to become
ŽARKO IN THE FILM SMEKER, 1986 ŽARKO AS MILOŠ OBILIĆ IN THE 1989 FILM BATTLE OF KOSOVO
