When I mentioned to friends that I was going to be writing about the painter Marc Chagall (1887–1985), their reaction was, invariably, a rolling of the eyes. This response isn’t difficult to understand. If Chagall has not become an embarrassment on the scale of Salvador Dalí, his standing as an artist has fallen considerably. Mention of his name is likely to bring forth images of a Russian-Jewish mythology characterized by a ripe sentimentality and woolly expanses of blue, rose, and pink, the pictorial equivalents of cotton candy. While Chagall’s position as a master of early modernist painting remains fundamentally undiminished—the austere and enchanting Over Vitebsk (1915–20) is a mainstay of MOMA’s permanent collection for good reason—his reputation as a lovable hack has all but superseded it.

So when a volunteer at the Jewish Museum informed me last year that an upcoming Chagall exhibition was going to be “a blockbuster” I feared the worst. Not just because I felt that Chagall’s oeuvre couldn’t withstand such an exhibition, but because such exhibitions are often dubious enterprises in themselves. While the blockbuster does make for good museum PR and better box office, whether it provides the best environment—or even anenvironment—for looking at art is debatable. Peering over the heads of a half-dozen gallerygoers for a glimpse at a painting does not, after all, make for an ideal aesthetic experience, especially when the viewer is faced with the prospect of 399 more such “experiences.” Artists, even our greatest ones, are