There are many ways to view the lush, colorful, dreamlike and apparently naive art of Marc Chagall, one of the undoubted greats of 20th-century painting. "Marc Chagall and the Russian Avant-garde, from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou" at The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of Arts, makes a brave attempt to set him within the context of his times, something that doesn't quite work with a painter who, more than most, unquestionably followed his own secret muse.
The exhibition, which is certainly impressive to look at, presents several other Russian avant-garde artists from the time: Natalia Goncharova, a primitivist who later turned to cubo- futurism; Mikhail Larionov, the originator of the seldom-appreciated Rayonist movement; and the abstract painter Vassily Kandinsky, who, as the paintings here display, was also a fairly good figurative artist. There are also a few excellent cubist-inspired sculptural works by the likes of Alexander Archipenko, Jacques Lipchitz and Ossip Zadkine, and an odd selection of what look like futuristic architecture models by that incurable avant-gardist Kasimir Malevich.
These are all people with whom Chagall was associated in various ways or who at least breathed the same early-20th-century air of revolutionary foment. But this aside, there is very little in common in artistic terms. Chagall's precursors were French symbolists such as Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon, while his closest artistic fellow travelers include the likes of Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy and Paul Klee, painters who shared his artistic lyricism and love of color.