Marc Chagall. A Cow with a Parasol. 1946

A Cow with a Parasol

Marc Chagall

1946

Marc Chagall. Wedding Candles. 1945

Wedding Candles

Marc Chagall

1945

______________________________

I have three wedding paintings by Chagall in my files. This is the one latest in date. Lisa, if you ever need another Chagall wedding reproduction…

Note well how this piece is more “Jewish” than the other two. It shows, perhaps, that Chagall, as he grew older, had a greater appreciation of his particular roots and sources, although I would say that he always had such, it just became accentuated with age (is that true of all of us? One wonders…).

BMD

Visions of Divinity. Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin (music by Paul Hillier)

******

******

Now… for something entirely different, as John Cleese would say! The Russian religious art of Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin is matched with… a pre-Second Great Awakening American hymn! Unlike the vacuous and vapid music currently in use amongst Evangelical Protestants, there was a vigorous church music tradition growing in America prior to 1800. It was destroyed by the Second Great Awakening, which was, in actuality, a Second Reformation founding an entirely new non-Christian faith (I would say it is closer to Gnosticism than anything else). Music and texts quite similar to our own in Russia were replaced by treacly sentimentality and empty emotion expressing the non-credo of this new faith. I lament for a lost tradition (it exists today only in isolated pockets in the rural South, were it is known as “Sacred Harp” or “Shaped-note” singing). Deacon Andrei Kuraev spoke truly when he said that “Orthodoxy is fine music made in the conservatoire, whilst (Evangelical) Protestantism is low music made in the honky-tonk bars”. Amen!

BMD

A World of Lost Brightness, Part One (music by Chopin)

******

______________________________

The portraiture of Valentin Serov. Serov was one of the Russian Impressionists and was the most renowned portraitist in fin du sieclè Petersburg. He was known for his bright palette and the lightness of his paintings. It was truly a “world of lost brightness”, for this was the final stage before the revolution (although no knew that, of course). Contrary to what many believe, it was not poor peasants or workers who made the revolution, it was Westernised intellectuals who had lost their Russian roots. Oddly enough, some of them fled the Bolshevik takeover and settled in France, where they formed a rebel church that has infected portions of the Orthodox Church in the USA (although it is dying out, thankfully). The music is the Nocturne in A flat major, op 32 nr 2 by Frédéric Chopin played by Yevgeny Kissin.

BMD