My eyes are first drawn to the man hovering over the buildings, his hair as golden as the ratio his hunched torso curves into. His red pyjamas and alabaster skin. Pointless imagining his size, the painting’s scale. Is that a palette in his hand? Brushes? A cathedral sized painter resting in the sky above the red roofs. The scene below glowing, up in flames but life goes on. Tucked in the far left a man dines in the open air, a samovar on his table, a lamp between them. In the centre a crucifixion, the Messiah’s gilded flesh and halo, the two Marys wailing before him, one with outstretched arms, the other holding a baby. Behold the child, behold the man. Outlines of bodies seeping through the pigment, blending with the walls. A donkey’s head jutting out of a stable. The red demarcated then by a diagonal line running from the bottom left to the right’s dead centre, this lower triangle made up of ochre cut with leaded white. A chariot dragged by two horses charges across the canvas, the driver lying on his front with his whip extended, both palaeolithic and modern, racing away from the feet of another giant. He holds a woman; they appear as one, her legs his chest and his hers, her body bent backwards and hair to one side. In his left hand a bouquet. Above him, above the red, in the top right, set into the black against a yolk moon, a candle bearer encircled by a pink ring, a two-headed dove behind his own singular head; his eyes on the man hovering above the buildings, whose back brushes the upper triangle of the canvas: a Gothic facade, stone archways—a train station? bridges?—somewhere in Paris. But where?
I thought of Oscar. How many times he’s raved to me about Chagall, shown me references on his phone, flicked to a page of a paint-splattered book in his studio, recounted some anecdote or other, compared his imagery taken from Jewish mysticism to Lispector’s writing, explained the power of the forgery, fawned, filled me with passion for someone whose work I never gave much thought to. Still, no matter how much he told me about him, I was always more in awe of how he told me about him. The light in his face as he proselytised.
On Wednesday I lost my indifference and stood before Les toits rouges for the best part of an hour, until my eyes were burnt out and I left the gallery. It was the only painting I really saw. When I was last there it had captured my attention but the room was too busy to hang about. This time, however, it was quiet; the rain perhaps keeping people away. Who knows. Anyway, there I stood, stepping closer and then stepping away, moving from one side to the next and back again. There was so much happening. So much life. It was dreamlike, filled with biblical imagery, filled with reality. It was like something out of The Master and Margarita. I couldn’t look away. I took my glasses off, letting everything blur into a mass of colours and shapes. I listened to a grandma ask her granddaughter about each of the other Chagall’s in the room. What’s this one called? When was it painted? What do you see? Yes, that’s it. And who’s that? Do you think that’s his wife? Is that Paris? Or is it Russia? What does it make you think of? The little girl diligently answering everything put to her and deciding when to move on to the next work.
They stand beside me. The woman’s fleece matches the red of the painting, the little girl’s face painted with pink and green pastels. He’s a painter, she says, her finger pointed at the man hovering above the houses. I think you’re right, her grandma replies. And who’s that? she asks, guiding the girl’s hand to the centre of the canvas. That’s Jesus, she says; and that’s a restaurant. Neither of them posit a guess as to where the upper part of the scene might be and turn their attention to the next painting. I want to do the same but I stay put, hoping that the longer I look at the stone facade, the more I inspect the nearby bridges, the location will reveal itself to me.
It looks familiar. Part of me thinks it’s Notre Dame, just around the corner from where we are at Le Centre Pompidou; but I’m not sure. Something makes me think it isn’t. I can’t make up my mind and I can’t look away. I want to know where it is. I want to figure it out and go, to be inside the painting.
I get soaked walking to the metro. I fight the urge to go and buy some cigarettes. I make some coffee and set to writing this. The room is dark but warm. Nowhere online tells me what part of Paris he depicted in that top corner.
Later that evening I walked up Avenue Daumesnil and sat on the steps of l’Opéra Bastille. To my left a man recorded a segment for the news, speaking alone to a lens as he held a microphone, his face lit by an LED panel mounted on the camera; to my right a couple shared a moment and kissed in the flicker of the passing headlights; ahead of me the Colonne de Juillet, its verdigris encrusted bronze column lit from the base, the golden statue at the top glowing against the black of the night. Every few seconds the spotlight of the Eiffel Tower scanned across the sky. Everywhere I looked my astigmatism caused the neon of the cafés to streak. ‘In Paris,’ Chagall said, ‘I discovered light.’
On Thursday and Friday I continued my search. I consulted essays and books and blogposts but came up stumps at every corner. Given the chimeric nature of the painting it might be a composite of Parisian images. I may never truly find it. But I can find the parts that make the whole, stand among them and then stand before them joined together on the canvas. There is time yet.
I looked up various churches but none of them looked right, so I followed my first thought and went to Notre Dame. As I stood before it I felt more assured, and the more I looked at it, comparing it to the photo I had of the painting, the more certain I became. There’s a few incongruities to the facade, and it’s portrayed at an impossible angle: a geometry of the unconscious; the Seine, however, remains to its right, but the vantage point you’d need to see the bridges (which are curved more on the canvas than in real life) is all but unattainable. Thankfully, since the fire, a set of bleachers have been set up directly in front of the cathedral to allow you to see over the fence surrounding it. So I walked up and stood at the back, where, about 3m above ground, I was able to get as close as possible to recreating Chagall’s point of view.
After a few minutes I was satisfied. Despite my hunch I had become convinced that I wouldn’t find it, that with every Gothic church I passed the uncertainty would nag at me; but now I was sure. Now I tried to envision Chagall walking about where I stood, sketching a study, or trying to get into one of the surrounding buildings to see things as the painting shows them, or perhaps just daydreaming, as I was, listening in to nearby conversations as people marvelled at the edifice before us. Had it been as busy when he stood before it? Did anything linger from the war not yet a decade behind him? How similar was what he saw to what I saw?
I left the amateur photographers, the tourists and hawkers behind and followed the steps down to the Seine. Walking under the bridges I thought about the Cathedral up in flames. Are the buildings Chagall depicted in the same plight or are they merely red? What does it matter? I’d been walking for hours at this point and sat down on an embankment, the river lapping at the stones and boats passing by.
When my sister was here in September she asked why the cathedral was so famous. It was one of those questions that’s at once so simple yet so difficult to answer. By now it’s famous because it’s famous. But its age and all the trappings that come with it are as hard earned as they aren’t. Of course there’s all the depictions of it, and Victor Hugo’s novel; but for me there’s two things I think of most. First is its relationship with music. Inside the lofty structure polyphony was experimented with and developed by a group of composers almost a thousand years ago, completely changing harmony in Western music; the height of the building and the reverb this and its stones created allowing for brand new sonic ways of expressing ourselves and our devotion. Naturally, at the time, some considered it ostentatious and heretical. Yet now, when you listen to it, it sounds so simple. A creative leap forward made commonplace with time. A stitch in the artistic fabric.
The second is the cathedral as a shared project. Whether you go in for God or not, there’s something moving about the idea of a building taking hundreds of years to build, being passed down the generations, its masons and craftsmen accepting that they won’t live to see their project finished because it isn’t their project.
As the sun set and the moon came out a swan went back and forth up the river, its beak a dull orange. There’s a Baudelaire poem—dedicated to Victor Hugo—that takes its name from a swan bathing in the dust of the streets. He’s talking about how much Paris has changed, its rapid modernisation in the late 19th century; the scaffolding surrounding Notre Dame and the giant cranes lumbering over it no doubt an entirely plausible image for him, as it would be for Chagall, both seeing the city change so drastically in their lives. The Cathedral continues its path down the centuries; so too Paris.
The swan swims away, a boat goes by and some children wave at me. The moonlight tinsels the water and sirens moan in the distance. I finish my beer and stand up to make my way home, blending into the crowds, the flashes of cameras capturing God knows how many of us into others visions of the city.