By Hilton Kramer

May 6, 2001 | 8:00 p.m

About the art of Marc Chagall, which is currently the

subject of an important exhibition at the Jewish Museum, almost every reader of this column is likely to have an opinion. Chagall was not only famous in his time but remains popular today. His work is now as familiar to us as that of Picasso and Matisse, and he lived longer than both. He wasn't much given to shunning the limelight, either; he courted attention, and received it in large measures. In his later years, moreover, he was lavished with commissions for murals and other ambitious decorative projects that made him an international celebrity. These ranged from the Metropolitan Opera and the United Nations in New York to the First National Bank in Chicago, to the Knesset in Jerusalem, the Paris Opera and a couple of cathedrals in France. It was no wonder that when he died in 1985 at 97, the front-page headline in The New York Times declared him to be "One of Modern Art's Giants." This is anything but a universal view of Chagall's achievement today. For some of us, he is a decidedly more equivocal figure-an artist of high accomplishment, to be sure, but one whose genius had in most respects expired long before the man himself. For critics of this persuasion, it has often been a tiresome chore to distinguish the quality in Chagall's copious oeuvre from the quantities of sentimental dross he also produced with such effortless facility. The dismal murals he created for the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center are only the most familiar of the many projects that proved to be damaging to his reputation as an artist. Whatever our critical judgment of Chagall may be, however, there can be no question but that the exhibition which has now been organized at the Jewish Museum is essential to any serious understanding of the man and his work. For this exhibition of Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections recalls us to a stubborn fact: that until 1922, when Chagall was 35 and had already produced the bulk of the work that is likely to retain a place among the classics of 20th-century art, he had spent a total of less than four years outside his native Russia. This is not to minimize his life as a Jew under the Czarist regime or the specifically Hasidic influence on the kind of imagination that Chagall brought to his work. About both of these subjects the curator of the exhibition, Susan Tumarkin Goodman, provides an illuminating account in the excellent catalog of the show. Yet as another contributor to the catalog, Evgenia Petrova, reminds us: "Before 1930, no one who wrote about Chagall or exhibited his works in museums and exhibitions ever separated him from Russia." It was in Russia that Chagall became an artist. It was under Russian teachers (two of them Jews) who had themselves been trained at the Imperial Academy of Art in St. Petersburg-Yehuda Pen, Leon Bakst (originally Lev Rosenberg) and Nikolai Roerich-that Chagall received his own training. And it was in Russia that he acquired his first patron, whose support enabled Chagall to establish his first period of residence in Paris (1910-14). "During the spring of 1910," writes Ms. Goodman, "Chagall's foremost teacher, Leon Bakst, left St. Petersburg for Paris to join Sergei Diaghilev's ballet company. Chagall also felt the desire to visit the art capital of Europe. In exchange for a single painting and one drawing, his patron, Maxim Vinaver, offered Chagall a stipend that enabled him to spend almost four years in Paris. And it was here, in the years before World War I, that he developed his unique style." It was thus in Paris that Chagall became a Russian modernist. For even at this pivotal turn in Chagall's development, he tended to frequent a distinctly Russian milieu. He was particularly close to the Swiss poet Blaise Cendrars, who had lived in St. Petersburg for three years (1904-7) and spoke Russian. So did the woman Cendrars married, Féla Poznanska, to whom Chagall was also close. He was drawn into the circle of Sonia Delaunay, who was Russian, and her husband Robert Delaunay-probably the most important single influence on Chagall's painting in this Paris period. In the studio building-the legendary La Ruche-where Chagall lived for a time, there were many Russians in residence, not all of them painters. One of them was the writer A.V. Lunacharsky, who, as Lenin's first Commissar of Education, subsequently appointed Chagall to the position of Commissar of Art in his hometown of Vitebsk. Over the last two decades or so, there have been a number of exhibitions on both sides of the Atlantic that examined certain aspects of Chagall's early artistic development. As recently as 1992, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibited the murals that Chagall created for the State Jewish Chamber Theater in Moscow in 1920, the first and certainly the finest of all Chagall's mural projects, and these are once again included in the current show at the Jewish Museum. Yet everything else in this exhibition of Early Works from Russian Collections , which covers the years 1908-20, is being exhibited in this country for the first time, and it gives us an uncommonly close look both at an uncommonly precocious talent in its early stages of development and then, in the last two galleries of the show, at the first flowering of a modern master. The show also gives us a look at something else we haven't seen before: the paintings of Chagall's first teacher, Yehuda Pen, a highly accomplished academic realist who specialized in Jewish subjects. (Among Pen's other students, by the way, were El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine.) Nothing could be further from Chagall's gift for poetic invention in painting than Pen's meticulously prosaic attention to detail in his portraits and landscapes. Yet he was obviously an inspired teacher who gave Chagall (among much else) the courage and the means to pursue his artistic dreams. It is interesting to note, moreover, that from the outset Chagall was never himself a realist. The gift for fantasy, caricature and the folkloric is in evidence from the beginning, though not a command of the complex pictorial structures that elevate Chagall's best painting to a higher level of accomplishment. That had to wait for Chagall's encounter with Cubist form and Fauvist color in Paris. It is thus in the next-to-last gallery of the exhibition that we encounter Chagall as a modernist master for the first time-and, alas, almost for the last time. Except for the murals he created for the Jewish Theater in Moscow during his Soviet period, Chagall was never again to produce masterworks on the order of Over the Town , The Promenade , The Apparition and Jew in Bright Red (all dating from the war years 1914-18 in Russia). This was an amazing period for any artist to live through, with the outbreak of war in 1914 and revolution in 1917, and yet the paintings Chagall produced during this period of violent upheaval are among the most assured and, in the case of the pictures of the artist and his bride-he married his sweetheart in 1915-the happiest he ever made. Only a mind like Chagall's, which gave priority to fantasy and dream over the harshest realities of history, could have produced such happy paintings in the midst of such widespread carnage. The murals for the Jewish Theater are far more somber, and the largest of them, the Introduction to the Jewish Theater (1920), is the only work of Chagall's that even obliquely reflects the influence of the artist who became Chagall's principal antagonist during his Soviet period, Kazimir Malevich. In the soft-edged arcs, circles and other geometrical forms in this vast mural, Malevich's Suprematist abstraction is itself rendered as a kind of dreamscape. One can only wonder how conscious Chagall was of this influence on the mural, for he otherwise loathed everything about Malevich and his ideas. For these and other reasons, Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections has an interesting story to tell, and it remains on view at the Jewish Museum, Fifth Avenue at 92nd Street, through Oct. 14.