Chagall's Windows and the American Mind

While I was almost falling off the chair in slumber at SBL last week, my wife was out giving Chicago a run for its money.  While spending the day at the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago (she loves her some modern art!), she ran into Chagall's American windows, painted by him as a gift to the Institute and to former Mayor Richard Daley, in honor of America's bicentennial.  Barbara Keer of LA's Splash Magazine notes (here) the "ethereality that suggests the creative expansiveness made possible by American freedom and liberty."  Her comment leaves me with one word to say:

Terrible.  

First of all, it is demonstrably the case that Chagall's windows are unmistakably Chagallian because Chagall simply paints this way.  Take a look at his "Circus" from 1967.  

Notice the dancer near the top frame in blue, and compare, for example, to the bird in the America Windows:

The figures show an amazing similarity.  The whimsy and "expansiveness" in Chagall is Chagall!  Keer misses the unremitting Monarchism in art, the thing that caused W. H. Auden to aver that if the process of making art were to be translated into politics, the result would be totalitarianism.  

Chagall's paintings look this way because Chagall exercised power over the craft to make it that way.  And here is the conundrum of art and politics:  there is so much bad art.  Similarly, some people's visions for a healthy society are just terrible.  It follows that just as there is good art, there is good political vision–vision which lays claim to us by the sheer suasion of its goodness.  Just as good art has a beauty that does not force the assent that it nevertheless rightly compels, there must be a kind of sociality whose goodness makes similar demands.  

All art is totalitarian; only some of that is great art.  But the great artist manages the paradox of totalitarian control and submission to the integrity of a subject as it suggests itself.  In practice, this comes out in the wash as the hand-clasping stream of changes that occur when the artist begins with one vision and sees that vision revised (by the artist, yes, but also not so) in the work's end.  A great artist will know how to let the subject suggest to him the best thing, a thing which he then executes with all the precision he is able to summon.  Great art is subordinate to the artist's recognition of the integrity of the thing being communicated.  That integrity simply cannot be seen except that the artist recognize it and then build it into the art.  And yet, the integrity that comes about in the art is precisely that which the artist has put there.  

I have seen this in dozens of my own poems.  It is very rarely the case that a good poem will be the result of a vision that never changes on the way.  The better the artist, the more free to humble himself and give to the piece that is forming.  If the artist's ego prevents that humility, the artist's will will be done, but the art will lack the integrity of a beautiful thing.  If the artist is humble, everything else (including the technique, to the best of the artist's ability) will follow in that train, for the form appropriate to a given subject is part of what ultimately gives the subject integrity.  

And it may be that the beautiful and the good come about by the same means.  If so, then democracy is a mere stopgap to prevent those whose visions for society are evil from ever having the paintbrush for long enough to do real damage.  In that sense, I endorse and celebrate it.  But it should not be concluded that democracy is therefore the best possible system.  In this sense, Ezra Pound was right–the city runs best when its best people are deployed doing what they are best at.  And the best governors should have the most power.  If there were a perfect governor, democracy would serve the people she governed terribly–for she should be empowered absolutely, and the goodness of her vision compels assent even if, humans being what they are, it cannot force it.  When that governor enacts a law, it would be right to assume that if I don't like it, I am wrong, just as I was wrong when, in my first encounter with it, I dismissed the poetry of Wallace Stevens.  

This sentiment is un-American.  But America is a society precisely built on the assumption that the good will never command the universal assent it deserves–that there can never be a such thing as the one mind of the body politic.  I'll take it in view of the foreseeable alternatives.  But I'd also love the opportunity to trade it in, and that is a helpful corrective to democratic triumphalism.  Indeed, the very opportunity for a better order would go unnoticed in a society where the good and the beautiful are divorced such that Chagall's unique vision can be chalked up to a democratic ideal.  

I'd love your thoughts on this.  Hit me up!