Vicente Aleixandre Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Federico Revilla

Critical Essay by Federico Revilla

SOURCE: “Spiritual Coincidences between Marc Chagall and Vincente Aleixandre,” in Neohelicon, Vol. 14, No. 1, 1987, pp. 193-207.

In the following essay, Revilla finds similarities in the respective artistic visions of Aleixandre and the painter Marc Chagall.

There are apparently few common features between the biography of Marc Chagall, a “total artist” he may be, but above all a painter, and that of Vicente Aleixandre the poet and 1977 Nobel Prize winner. Indeed one can claim that the lives of the two men are absolutely different. Chagall, a Russian Jew, grew up in and was formed by Hassidism, a faith which imprinted an indelible mark upon him, even if in his mature years he abandoned the faith of his fathers without any spiritual crisis. Aleixandre is a middle class Spaniard with a certain skepticism towards his milieu's catholicism. Chagall had wandered through the whole world before he settled down and...
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