'Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse" by J. Patrick Lewis & Jane Yolen (LS 5663)

Lewis, J. Patrick and Jane Yolen. 2011. Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.

ISBN: 987-1-56846-211-0

Cover image from:
www.janeyolen.com

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk in Russia in 1887.  His parents were solidly working-class, but young Marc wanted to become an artist. He studied painting in St. Petersburg, and then apprenticed to another painter and scene designer when he met Bella, who would become his wife.  He moved to Paris to study painting.  He was living in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, but eventually managed to obtain visas for his young family to leave Russia; and they moved to Paris, where they lived until the Nazi regime invaded France.  Chagall, who was Jewish, fled France, and settled in New York City for several years, returning to France after World War II ended.  Sadly, his beloved wife, Bella, had died in New York in 1944.  Chagall continued to paint, draw, and in the latter part of his career, design stained glass.  He died in Paris in 1985, at the age of 97.

It's not hard to recognize Chagall's distinctive style of painting.  It's an entrancing combination of hard and soft edges, blended colors, rich hues, and whimsical, musically talented animals, generally goats.  In fact, one of my favorite paintings is his La Mariée, known to most people as the print in Hugh Grant's kitchen in the film Notting Hill.  La Mariée doesn't make an appearance in J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen's Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse, but many of his other paintings appear to create illustrations with the poems that briefly, but richly describe Chagall's eventful life or narrate his paintings.  His paintings are poetry, but a poetry that utilizes images instead of words, so it makes sense to pair his paintings with poetry.  J. Patrick Lewis and Jane Yolen partner together to create a lyrical biography of Marc Chagall and his artwork.

Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers contains fourteen poems that share a title with the accompanying painting.  Yolen and Lewis each wrote seven of the poems, beginning with Chagall's birth ("Maternity") and ending with the elegiac "The Fall of Icarus."  Each poem/painting combination also has a brief bit of biographical information that corresponds to the time period in the poem.  The name of the poet who wrote the particular poem appears in rather small font, perpendicular and to the left of the actual poem, which also helps to steer the focus of the reader to the poem itself and not the particular author.  Each painting has a caption with the title of the painting; the year Chagall painted it; its size; and the name of the museum or person who owns it.  There are also a few photographs of Chagall, usually with his wife in the book.  It also contains footnotes to explain some of the Hebrew or Yiddish words that appear in the poems or a particular Jewish tradition.  Their location at the end of each page is ideal, so a reader's eyes flick quickly down to the bottom to find the information, then they can go right back into the poem without missing a beat.  The book's layout follow s a regular pattern: the poem on the left side of a two-page spread, with the reproduction of the painting on the right.  The pages themselves are lovely -- the heavy, glossy paper one usually sees in heavy books that contain reproductions of famous works of art.  Yolen and Lewis also include a list of sources at the end of the book.  Two of them are memoirs written by both Bella and Marc.  Yolen and Lewis both weave Bella and Marc's own words into their poems, giving them a level of immediacy and intimacy that draws you into their world.

Why name the book after the painting Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers?  In Yiddish, (as Lewis and Yolen note) to do something well, with a level of finesse and expertise,  is to do it with seven fingers. Did Chagall paint with seven fingers?  I would definitely say so.

Lewis and Yolen have much different styles of poetry.  Yolen tends to write in a more flexible, free-verse style, while Lewis' poems generally have a distinct rhythm and rhyme scheme.  Lewis uses rhyme to help create a mannered rhythm in his poems, especially in "I and the Village" and "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers."  "I and the Village" uses a series of rhymed couplets, while "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers" contains four stanzas, each with four lines.  The outer lines of each stanza rhyme, and the inner lines rhyme like this: "Today I make a work of art, / A red-and-orange wonderland, / By seven-fingered sleight of hand -- / Let ambiguity play a part" (Lewis 2011, 24).  The combination of the symmetry of the poem (four lines, four stanzas) is juxtaposed next to the Cubist, but still fluid painting, "Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers."  Lewis also wrote the bouncy "Over Vitebsk," which reflects Chagall's nine or ten year old self, looking back at his first forays into art.  One of Lewis' (2011) poems, "The Promenade," employs personification, describing Paris as the "patron saint of color" (26).  Perhaps the best use of personification in this poem is how Lewis (2011) describes New York as a woman with secrets and a history, hidden underneath the glitzy costumes and makeup: "New York, kaleidoscope of the world, red and / amber carnival of the senses, dares anyone to find / the gritty soul beneath her glitter petticoats" (26).

Yolen's verse veers more toward the poignant, emotional soul of Chagall and his paintings.  She incorporates a quote from Bella that describes her first meeting with Chagall in "My Fiancée in Black Gloves:" "his eyes, /... so blue as the sky, / and oblong, like almonds" (Yolen 2011, 15).  Yolen writes her poem to compliment Bella's words and capture the feeling of exuberant joy.  In it, she alludes to Chagall's future eclipse over his master by calling him "a sun over Bakst's pale moon" (Yolen 2011, 15).  Yolen (2011) uses Chagall's painting "Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine" to imagine how Bella was able to keep the family's life running smoothly, allowing Marc to create his "scribbles full of color and love" (20).  Yolen (2011) imagines Marc saying of Bella, "she could tote us like an old rag peddler / bent double with his heavy sacks... / never feeling the weight" (20).  In those few phrases, Yolen is able to convey how Chagall must have felt about his wife and the way she supported and inspired his need to paint and draw.  It's a sentiment paralleled in "Autoportrait" that details Chagall's life with his second wife, Vava, who (according to the biographical information that accompanies the poem) helped Chagall find a renewed zest for painting that seemed to have been lost when Bella died.  Yolen (2011) writes, "I take off my hat to you, Vava, / and my heart, / that stopped beating after Bella's death. / Only promise not to straighten my studio / where clutter feeds the artist's life" (34).

Perhaps the most poignant of the Yolen poems is "The Flying Horse," which describes how Chagall and his family fled Paris after the Nazi invasion, carrying the memory of the men, women, and children left behind in the camps; the artwork they had to leave behind; and the city of Paris itself.  Yolen (2011) gently alludes to Bella's imminent death, by saying, "But Death, that old leveller, / can find you wherever you go" (31).  Even though the family escaped the horrors of the Holocaust, Death could still find them, even an ocean away in New York.  In the poems where they refer to God, the authors even follow the traditional Jewish convention of writing it as "G-d."  (In more traditional Jewish communities, it is seen as disrespectful to write out the name of God.)

The book is neatly bookended by Chagall's birth and his forays into designing and making stained glass windows, an art form he didn't begin to pursue until he was over seventy years old.  The final poem, however, is an interpretation of Chagall's painting, "The Fall of Icarus," completed when he was nearly ninety.  Rather than paint Icarus falling into the sea, as is commonly told through legend, Chagall depicted Icarus falling to the middle of a field, surrounded on one side by people genuinely distressed at his passing, and on the other by people reveling in their schadenfreude.  While Lewis doesn't come out and say so, one can surmise that he views the painting as a commentary of all that Chagall had viewed and experienced during his long life.  It serves to summarize the whole of Chagall's rather eventful life.  Through his art, Chagall experienced the greatest heights of what humanity can offer the world, but he also experienced worst.

This book should appeal to secondary grade students and some middle grade students.  While the format might make people think of it as a picture book, and mistakenly label it as a piece of juvenilia, the combination of poetry and art analysis might be a bit advanced for younger students.  It isn't that I feel that younger students can't understand it.  I think they might enjoy some of the poetry, or have insights to the artwork that aren't apparent to adults.  It might be a work they won't fully appreciate until they are older, with a little more life experience under their belt.  It would make a great addition to an art or art history class library or a Judaica class that studies significant Jewish figures.

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Spotlight on...

"The Violinist"

Oh, Uncle, play me a communion,
on your kishefdik violin
as you dance in the big boots on the rooftop.
Let me sway with you in shoes of fire
on the streets of Lyozno, Ekaterinoslav, Vitebsk,
and in all the little shtetls where men dance together
and women envy our excesses.
There is something heroic about that dance,
every one of us making our way in song
up the long road to the throne of G-d.

kishefdik: Yiddish for "magical" or "charmed by a magic spell"
shtetls: Jewish villages, often those just outside of big towns
G-d: the way some observant Jews spell the Lord's name (Yolen 2011, 12).

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I was intrigued by the concept of using poetry to create a biography of an artist by interpreting their paintings.  After sharing the poem and the painting with an art class, the students would work individually or in small groups to choose an artist, select a painting or two, then write a poem that either interprets the painting, tells a story about what's going on in the painting, or reflects a moment in the artist's life.  They can incorporate the poem into the painting by deconstructing the pairing and making a collage with the painting and the poem.

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Works Cited

Lewis, J. Patrick and Jane Yolen. 2011. Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers: The Life of Marc Chagall in Verse. Mankato, MN: Creative Editions.