Chagall Bio Lacks Human Color

"Chagall: A Biography," by Jackie Wullschlager (Alfred A. Knopf, $40)

Jackie Wullschlager's sober, dispassionate, well-researched, lavishly illustrated and nearly cuboid new biography of Marc Chagall has the look and feel of a major and desirable book. And why shouldn't it? Wullschlager is chief art critic for The Financial Times, where her articulate reviews are worth seeking out.

About this Chagall biography, however, there is no stepping around it: Some crucial animating spark has gone missing. The book has a flat, dutiful tone, as if it aspired to be a frighteningly long Encyclopaedia Britannica entry. The primary characters have embalming fluid rather than blood coursing through their veins. Worse, Wullschlager can't seem to get the critic in her mind into sync with the storyteller who cohabitates there.

She describes so many of Chagall's paintings, one after another, that to read her book is to feel lashed to a deck chair for an 18-hour slide show. It didn't have to be this way.

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a fascinating figure, one of the 20th century's most unlikely self-made masters. He scraped his way through intense and trying historical times: the Russian Revolution and two world wars. Hitler found his art degenerate, and he was lucky to survive that fact.

Chagall lived long enough to see his reputation swing wildly, from avant-garde champion in revolutionary Russia to much-mocked promulgator of ethnic kitsch, the man who accidentally supplied the iconography for "Fiddler on the Roof." In the early 1950s, the always-quotable Picasso put it pretty well about Chagall's strengths and weaknesses: "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is."

Picasso said he was not crazy about the "flying violins and all the folklore, but his canvases are really painted, not just thrown together."

Wullschlager steers the reader through the details of Chagall's life. He was born in Vitebsk, Russia, one of nine children in a poor Jewish family.

Vitebsk was not much to look at. (Chagall compared its color to that of shoes and potatoes.) But this shtetl, with its wooden huts and rabbis and goatherds supplied Chagall, throughout his life, with the visual material for his best paintings.

Part of the problem with "Chagall," the biography, is Chagall the man - you're not sure you care very deeply about him, or that Wullschlager does. The person at the center of this book remains a bit of an inky, unhappy blur. There are moments here in which he is shown to be lively, alert, kind and interesting. But he generally comes off as an insincere and emotionally fragile flower, an ogre to work with, and as jealous and ungenerous.

Once in America, he seemed lost, a permanent exile. Wullschlager describes the way he liked to "wander the back streets of Lower Manhattan to buy Jewish bread and gefilte fish and to converse in Yiddish with the small Jewish shopkeepers."