Marc Chagall. Come nella pittura, così nella poesia

Marc Chagall is one of those painters who have inspired the greatest number of 20th-century poets, writers and critics. For this reason Marc Chagall come nella pittura così nella poesia is being published by Electa on the occasion of the exhibition of the same name, opening in Mantua on September 5, 2018. In addition to presenting the influences and artistic and cultural pressures that Chagall responded to while living in Vitebsk, St. Petersburg, Paris and Moscow, it recounts the fascination that the Russian painter exercised on poets, artists and writers of the early last century, through a rich collection of writings, many translated into Italian for the first time.
The painter Marevna describes Chagall during his stay in Paris (he first arrived there in 1910) as a character in his own right: “Extremely seductive, confident and full of ambition, he soon abandoned the group of emigrants and moved closer to international avant-garde circles. His friends were progressive writers such as Apollinaire and Ricciotto Canudo and the Cubists of Montparnasse, close to Robert Delaunay.” These were the years when the affinities between the arts began to be identified and preached, projecting a single inspiration for painting, literature and music. In this climate Apollinaire’s poems were created, inspired by images in paintings by Robert Delaunay and Chagall.
André Breton, recognizing that Chagall had introduced metaphor into painting, included his works in the genesis of Surrealism. Breton declared that Chagall had inspired Apollinaire with perhaps the freest poem of the century, Through Europe; Blaise Cendrars with Prose on the Trans-Siberian and Mayakovsky and Esenin with “high paroxysmal accents.” In addition, Cendrars dedicated two poems to Chagall, so giving rise to the immense literature on the Russian artist.