DONKEYS IN THE SKY

ON the walls of Paris' Maeght Gallery last week, nudes floated over the Champs-Elysees, an ass crouched impaled on the spire of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Pres with no visible air of discomfort, a sleek donkey proffered flowers to a foreshortened mermaid floating in a bubble above the Bastille. Over the Opera, a huge bouquet flowered against a turkey-blood sky; at its heart were three dim, blue figures echoing Carpeaux' famed group of statuary, The Dance, while two entwined lovers floated down the Avenue de 1'Opera oblivious of traffic (see opposite page). Marc Chagall, the small, elfin man with the face like a melancholy Harpo Marx, was having his first one-man show in seven years.

Such paintings, with their fusion of lush color and pixilated charm, have beguiled thousands who do not pretend to understand them (if they are understandable), have put Chagall reproductions over many a middlebrow mantelpiece, and won their 64-year-old creator a place alongside such accepted modern French masters as Picasso, Matisse and Braque. "I am for order," he explains, "but if one wants order, the painting must have the air of disorder."

The son of a poor Jewish grocer, Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia, has carried a memory of his homeland through a life of wanderings. He came to Paris in 1910, lived through both prewar cubism and postwar surrealism, took something from both, was captured by neither. Instead, he clung to his own haunting evocations of nameless gaiety and wistful sadness, in a weightless world of objects flung aloft by some superhuman juggler and suspended in midair. Many of his themes derive from the Russian folk tales and Jewish rituals of his youth, still more from his happy marriage with his late wife Bella, whose image in bridal white or sensual black hovered across the skies of his paintings for years.

Now remarried, Chagall has been living for the past four years in Vence on the French Riviera. There he works all day, "even to midnight if my wife lets me," tries his hand at pottery, is considering an offer to decorate a iyth century chapel in Vence --a job he estimates might take ten years. Next year a Paris publishing house will put out a new Bible illustrated with 106 Chagall etchings.

All 30 of Chagall's current canvases, painted over the past seven years, are devoted to Paris themes. As usual, he refuses to explain any of them. Says Chagall: "In art you can't talk about theories, because art's a thing of life into which enter problems of love and death. One must be an arch-genius, and still more, to pretend to give theories. Cezanne launched theories, and Cezanne was almost that arch-genius. What is left today after 50 years--his theories or his art?"

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