Abstract

Art

The ability to identify a Chagall testifies as little to one's powers of connoisseurship as the ability to pick out a robin demonstrate ornithological competence. Such instantaneous identification explains Russian painter Marc Chagall's success as an artist. There was a time, not long past, when the Chagall reproduction was the decorative emblem of choice in the standard literate apartment, collaborating with the sling chair, the Parsons table, the Danish lamp, the Finnish rug, and, of course, last week's "New Yorker," to express the common taste of those loosely in touch with what is called today as modernism. It cannot have been the primary motivation of those who organized the impressively comprehensive exhibition of Chagall's work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, through July 21, to counteract this pictorial entropy, because, in part, they did not perceive it as a problem.