Book Report: Marc Chagall by Alfred Werner (1969)

I bought this book last spring at the Friends of the Springfield-Greene County Library book sale back when we had such things.

I didn’t review it during football games last year because I ended up traveling a lot and not watching that much football, and this book is a little text heavy for browsing as the book has some black-and-white images, but this book comes with a set of slides instead of the colored images.

After fifty-one years, the slides have all washed out into tones of red, so one cannot really appreciate the artist as the critics should you should appreciate him, which is to say for his use of color.

Because, let’s face it: In technique, he’s a twentieth-century man. The text says he’s the product of Gauguin and Matisse, so you know what I think about it. Middle school stuff. Look at this picture. Superficial no matter how much the critics will tell me that there is metaphor in it and that it’s an evolution or improvement over realism that came before it.

I have another volume like this for Cezanne which I’ll look over in the next couple of days or weeks. I might not like that, either. So it’s more a matter of reading it for completeness, so I can say why I don’t like a particular artist and be definitive about it.

Plus it’s an easy +1 to the annual reading list.