Where Does The Mediterranean Sea End? (Rechberghausen)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Rechberghausen
Date:	30/07/02 (141 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: wonderful

Disadvantages: far away

Last week when I was looking out of the window of a classroom on the ground floor (while teaching English grammar to my (un)interested pupils) I saw the tops of an olive tree, a lemon tree, two cypresses and five palms passing by. This event was only amazing in so far as the street in front of the school is a pedestrian precinct and therefore closed to the traffic, but not as such.

I had already read in the local newspaper that a gardening centre specialised in adapting plants from a warmer climate to the rougher Continental European one would transport some plants to the central hall in the nearby village Rechberghausen as decoration for the current exhibition 'Chagall and the Mediterranean Sea'.

Rechberghausen is a village about 50 km to the south east of Stuttgart, the capital of the land Baden-Württemberg in the south west of Germany, if you leave the radius of, say, 20 km, hardly anybody knows it and no German in their right minds would ever consider this village a destination for a day out, let alone a holiday.

Yet, three years ago around 13 000 people came for some hours during the summer months, this year more than 20 000 are expected, and they’re all in their right minds, oh yes, very much so, I know that, because I’m one of them!

The reason for this influx is the extraordinarily ambitious and courageous mayor. There had already been exhibitions of sculptures throughout the village the years before, but only of local artists; in 1999 he decided to play it big and engaged a well-known curator to stage an exhibition with some artefacts by Picasso for the village.

It was a sensation and not the financial disaster many grumblers had predicted. My prediction is that this year’s exhibition 'Chagall and the Mediterranean Sea' will be even more successful as the mouth-to-mouth propaganda about Rechberghausen being an art village will bear fruit now and also because Chagall is more acc
essible than Picasso.

The pictures, 20 oil paintings, gouaches, water colours, have come from Paris, Geneva and London, mostly from members of the Chagall family, one gouache 'St. Jean Cap-Ferrat' has never been exhibited before. And then there’s the series of lithographs 'Daphnis and Chloe' of which Chagall made 300 copies, 20 are still complete worldwide, very rarely are all 42 lithographs shown together.

Marc Chagall, was born on 7th July, 1887, in Vitebsk, Belorussia, in humble surroundings. In 1906, he left the Jewish elementary school he attended and began studying at Yehuda Pen's school of painting in Vitebsk.

Chagall died on 28th March, 1985, that means he painted for nearly 80 years! And he did indeed paint up to the end, he put his brush away after a busy day in his studio and died peacefully in his sleep.

In 1910 Chagall won a scholarship and went to Paris which was then a hotbed of thriving artists and competing schools. He befriended some of the great painters, but never became part of a movement, he didn‘t copy anyone and nobody copied him, all his life Chagall was always only Chagall.

He had his first exhibition in Berlin where 200 of his pictures were shown; in 1918 he went back to his hometown Witebsk where he became responsible for the fine arts of the region. From 1927 to 1933 he lived mainly in France. In 1937 all of his artefacts which were in Germany were taken out of the museums and burnt as 'degenerate art' and Chagall taken prisoner in Marseille in 1941, after his release he emigrated to the USA. In 1948 he went back to France where he lived for the rest of his life in the south, on the Cote d'Azur, interrupted only by a visit to his Belorussian homeland in 1973, after 51 years of absence.

When entering an exhibition of Chagall‘s work, one is immediately overwhelmed by the colourfulness of the pictures. Chagall didn‘t start with
the outlines of whatever he wanted to depict, but with the colours and decided what colour some object or figure should have by looking at the colours he had already used. He decided that, say, some red would be good at the right top of the canvas, then thought: "Why shouldn‘t that red spot be the shape of a cow, and think of it, why shouldn‘t that cow play the fiddle?!"

Up to his last days Chagall used recurring motifs, religious ones (he illustrated the Bible and designed windows for churches), the circus as a symbol for life, sheep, goats, cocks - a reminder of his rural background in Belorussia, the steeple of the church of Witebsk belongs there, too. The cock is also a symbol of masculinity for him, it can often be found together with lovers. Although he was married twice and lived with a third woman, he nearly only depicted his first wife Bella, for him the symbol of love. In one picture of Bella shown in Rechberghausen his head grows out of hers, a very intimate symbiosis.

When I entered I was drawn magnetically towards 'Table in front of Village'. The lower sixth of the picture shows a checked tablecloth in red, orange and white seen slightly from above with a plate with fruit, a loaf of bread, a knife, a bottle of wine and a glass. From the right a small yellow goat watches the arrangement. The bottle reaches into a stripe of green, lush meadows leading to a typical Mediterranean town on a hill. If you drew a horizontal line along the roofs, you‘d be in the middle of the picture. The highest point of the town is the steeple of the church sticking out into the blue sky covering the upper part. Into the blue grows a big green tree from the right side of the picture, on the left side a gigantic pink cock hovers over the houses carrying a pair of lovers whose lower bodies are pink like the feathers of the cock and whose upper parts are orange. The cock and the lovers have no clear contours, the colours becom
e cloudy and mix with the blue of the heaven, the upper left angle is pure orange.

Pink, orange, red - bah, I can‘t stand these colours, but in this picture they‘re just right, here they spell south, summer, joy of life, love. I couldn‘t steal this picture, not only because it‘s too big for a handbag, but also because the alarm system works as a man found out who went too close to look. ;-(

'Daphnis and Chloe' is a pastoral romance from ancient Greece by the author Longus. It tells the story of two teenagers, who love each other but do not know how to make love. Dreams, supernatural powers, pirates appear and divine presences mingle with peasant life in this tale of the mystery of love and sexual initiation.

Inspired by a journey through Greece, Marc Chagall, created his series of lithographs.

One of Chagall‘s granddaughters, who had come from Switzerland for the opening night, remarked that she hadn‘t known the Mediterranean Sea went as far as Rechberghausen. Well, obviously it does so

from 20th July to 29th September, 2002.
Open daily from 10.30 am to 7 pm
6 Euro / reduced 4
guided tours 6 Euro

If you can‘t make it (would be a pity, really!), you can at least order the book
Marc Chagall
Daphnis and Chloe
Prestel Publishing, Pegasus Library 2000
price: 5.99

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