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Marc Chagall
Born	Moshe Shagal
Nationality	Belarusian-Jewish-French
Known for	Painting, stained glass
Notable work	see List of Chagall's artwork
Movement	Surrealism, Expressionism

Marc Chagall (IPA: ʃʌ-ɡɑːl); [shuh-GAHL] (7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Russian-Jewish artist, born in Belarus (then Russian Empire) and naturalized French in 1937, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. He forged a unique career in virtually every artistic medium, including paintings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall's haunting, exuberant, and poetic images have enjoyed universal appeal, and art critic Robert Hughes called him "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."

As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be “the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists.” For decades he “had also been respected as the world’s preeminent Jewish artist.” He also accepted many non-Jewish commissions, including a stained glass for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, a Dag Hammarskjöld memorial at the United Nations, and the great ceiling mural in the Paris Opéra.

His most vital work was made on the eve of World War I, when he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his visions of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent his wartime years in Russia, becoming one the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avante-garde. In the wake of the October Revolution he founded the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

He was known to have two basic reputations, writes Lewis - as a pioneer of modernism, and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism’s golden age in Paris, where “he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism.” Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk." “When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.”

Early life and education

Home life

Marc Chagall, born Movsha Shagal, was born in the Belorussian city of Vitebsk in 1887. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was around 66,000, with half were Jewish, according to Lewis. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo," after the former cultural center of the Spanish Empire. As the city was mostly built of wood, little of it survived three years of Nazi occupation and destruction during World War II.

He was the eldest of nine children in a close-knit Jewish family led by his father Khatskl (Zakhar) Shagal, employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, who sold groceries from their home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles a month. Chagall's art would frequently include fish motifs "out of respect for his father," writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Chagall wrote of these early years:

"Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my father's lot (I beg of you, no compassion and certainly no pity, please). There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands."

During the previous decades, the Jewish population of the town survived pogroms, prejudice, segregation, and discrimination. As a result, they created their own schools, synagogues, hospitals, a cemetery, and other community institutions. One of their key sources of income was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia. They also made furniture and various agricultural tools. Art historian and curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman writes that for religious and economic reasons from the late 1700s to the First World War, Russia confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included sections of modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltic States. This caused the natural creation of Jewish shtetls throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, culture, and religious observances.

Most of what is known about Chagall’s early life have come from his autobiograhy, My Life, which he wrote at the age of 34. In it, he described the major influence that the culture of Hasidic Judaism had on his life as an artist. Vitebsk itself had been a center of that culture dating from the 1730s with its teachings derived from the Kabalah. Goodman describes the links and sources of his art to his early home:

"Chagall's art can be understood as the response to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader society, Jews were considered outsiders in a frequently hostile society. . . . Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life; his parents were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction in a life defined by their faith and organized by prayer."

Art education

In Russia at that time Jewish children were not allowed to attend regular Russian schools or universities due to policies of discrimination. Their movement within the city was also restricted. He therefore received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible. At the age of 13 his mother tried to enroll him in a Russian high school. Chagall remembered his thoughts when they reached the school's entrance: "But in that school, they don't take Jews. Without a moment's hesitation, my courageous mother walks up to a professor." She offered the headmaster 50 roubles to let him attend, which he accepted. Chagall spent a number of years there and remembered developing a fondness for geometry, which some have attributed to his later period experimenting with Cubism.

A turning point in his artistic life came when he first noticed a fellow student drawing. Baal-Teshuva writes that for the young Chagall, watching someone draw "was like a vision, a revelation in black and white." Chagall would later say how there was no art of any kind in his family's home and the concept was totally foreign to him. When Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied, "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it." He soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.

He eventually confided to his mother, "I want to be a painter," although she could not understand his sudden interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that "seemed so impractical," writes Goodman. The young Chagall explained, "There's a place in town; if I'm admitted and if I complete the course, I'll come out a regular artist. I'd be so happy!" It was 1906, and he had noticed the studio of Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a realist artist who also ran a small drawing school in Vitebsk, which included future luminaries as El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. Due to Chagall's youth and lack of income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. However, after a few months at the school, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires.

Artistic inspirations

Goodman notes that during this period in Russia, Jews had two basic alternatives for joining the art world: One was to "hide or deny one's Jewish roots," by moving away from any public expressions of Jewishness, in order to avoid the discrimination endemic in Russian society. The other alternative — the one that Chagall chose — was "to cherish and publicly express one's Jewish roots" by integrating them into his art. For Chagall, this was also his means of "self-assertion and an expression of principle."

Chagall biographer Franz Meyer, in looking back on Chagall's early artistic inspirations and attitude, would explain the connections of his art with his early life, and writes that "the hassidic spirit is still the basis ans source of nourishment of his art." Lewis adds, "As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers. . . . [with] scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms . . . "

Art career

Russia (1906—1910)

In 1906, he moved to St. Petersburg which was then the capital of Russia and the center of the country's artistic life with famous art schools. Since Jews were not permitted into that city without an internal passport, he managed to get a temporary passport from a friend. He was admitted to a prestigious art school and studied there for two years where he was "bored stiff," having to copy the heads of Roman and Greek citizens. From around 19097 onwards he began painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes.

From 1908-1910 Chagall studied under Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. While in St. Petersburg he was first exposed to experimental theater and the work of such artists as Gauguin. Bakst was a designer of decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and costumes for the 'Ballets Russes.' Bakst, also Jewish, helped Chagall by becoming a role model for Jewish success and achievement. After a year and half Bakst moved to Paris. Art historian Raymond Cogniat writes that after living and studying art on his own for four years, "Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art. . . . His apprenticeship over, Russia had played a memorable initial role in his life.

Chagall remained in St. Petersburg until 1910, and regularly visited his home town of Vitebsk where, in 1909, he met and fell in love with Bella Rosenfeld. In My Life Chagall described his first meeting her: "Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me."

France (1910—1914)

Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Chagall first arrived in Paris in 1910, Cubism the dominant art form and that French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th century." But Chagall arrived from Russia with "a ripe color gift, a fresh, anashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense of humor," he adds. These notions were foreign to Paris at that time. His first recognition came not from other painters but from poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire.

He therefore developed friendships with avant-garde luminaries Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger. Baal-Teshuva writes that "Chagall's dream of Paris, the city of light and above all, of freedom, had come true." His first days were a hardship for the 23-year-old Chagall, who found himself alone in the big city and unable to speak French. Some days he "felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he painted, about the riches of Russian folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and especially Bella.

He enrolled at La Palette, an art academy where the painters Segonzac and Le Fauconnier taught, and also found work at another academy. While in Paris he would spend his free time visiting the galleries and salons, especially the Louvre, where he studied the works of Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gough, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Milet, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and many others. It was in Paris that he learned the technique of gouache, which he used to paint Russian scenes. He also visited Montmarte and the Latin Quarter, "and was happy just breathing Parisian air." Baal-Teshuva describes this new phase in Chagall's artistic development:

"Chagall was exhilarated, intoxicated, as he strolled through the streets and along the banks of the Seine. Everything about trhe French capital excited him: the shops, the smell of fresh bread in the morning, the markets with their fresh fruit and vegetables, the wide boulevards, the cafe′s and restaurants, and above all the Eiffel Tower.

"Another completely new world that opened up for him was the kaleidoscope of colours and forms in the works of French artists. Chagall enthusiastically reviewed their many different tendencies, having to rethink his position as an artist and decide what creative avenue he wanted to pursue."

During his time in Paris he was constantly reminded of his home in Russia, as Paris was full of Russian painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigre′s. However, "night after night he painted until dawn," only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of the big city at night. During this period Chagall became acquainted with a number of poets, including Blaise Cendrars, who later became his closest friend, and Robert Delaunay. At one time he asked another poet and friend, Apollinaire, to introduce him to Picasso.

Chagall later painted his "Homage to Apollinaire" with a written dedication at the bottom. The painting showed a strong cubist influence which Chagall had begun experimenting with. Cubism was extremely popular at that time. However, Chagall would later write in My Life: "Personally, I do not think a scientific bent is a good thing for art. Impressionism and Cubism are foreign to me. Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul."

He continued to paint Jewish motifs and Vitebsk subjects, although during his last year in Paris he expanded his repertoire to include Parisian scenes - the Eiffel Tower in particular. He also painted more portraits. Many of his works were updated versions of painting he had made in Russia, transposed into Fauvist or Cubist keys, according to Lewis. He would continue to recycle earlier works and "would be one of the great peculiarities of his career."

As a result, he developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs: the ghostly figure floating in the sky, . . . the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down. The majority of his scenes of life in Vitebsk were painted in Paris, and "in a sense they were dreams," notes Lewis. Their "undertone of yearning and loss," with a detached and abstract appearance, caused Apollinaire to be "struck by this quality" and called them "surnaturel!" His "animal/human hybrids and airborne phantoms" would later become a formative influence on Surrealism. Chagall, however, did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself.

Because he missed not being with his fiancée, Bella, who was still in Vitebsk, "He thought about her day and night," writes Baal-Teshuva, and was afraid of losing her. He decided to accept an invitation from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention being to continue on to Russia, marry Bella, and then return with her to Paris. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited. The exhibit, held at Herwarth Walden's Sturm gallery was a huge success, "The German critics positively sang his praises," notes Baal-Teshuva. Apollinaire wrote a review describing Chagall as "a young Russian painter, a truly inspired colourist, who draws on the whimsical imagery of Slavic folk art, but always transcends it. He is an artist of enormous versatility who subscribes to no theory."

After the exhibit, he traveled on to Vitebsk, where he planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella. However, after a few weeks, the First World War broke out, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period.

Russia (1914—1922)

A year after returning to Russia he married his fiancée, Bella Rosenfeld, and later had their first child, Ida. Before their marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support her. Becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration. Hence, despite the ongoing war, Chagall's spirits remained high, mostly due to his marriage. According to Lewis, "[T]he euphoric paintings of this time, which show the young couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk—its wooden buildings faceted in the Delaunay manner—are the most lighthearted of his career." He also painted wedding pictures, a subject he would return to in later years.

The October Revolution of 1917 was a dangerous time for Chagall although it also offered opportunity. By then he was one of the Soviet Union's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special privileges and prestige as the "aesthetic arm of the revolution." He was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the country, but preferred something with a lower profile, and took a position as commissar of arts for Vitebsk. This resulted in his founding the Vitebsk Arts College which, adds Lewis, became the "most distinguished school of art in the Soviet Union."

It obtained for its faculty some of the most important artists in the country, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. He also added his first teacher, Yehuda Pen. Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective or independenly-minded artists, each with their own unique style. However, this soon to be difficult as some of the key faculty members preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles, and looked down on Chagall's attempt at creating "bourgeois individualism" in their teachings. Chagall then resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow.

In March 1915 Chagall began exibiting his work in Moscow. He exhibited 25 ofhis works at a well-known salon and in April 1916 exhibited 63 of hispictures in St. Petersburg. In November he again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists. This constant exposure caused his name to spread and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. Chagall had turned 30 and had begun to make a name for himself.

There he was offered a position as stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to open in early 1921 with a number of plays by Sholem Aleichem. For its opening he created a number of large background murals using techniques he learned from Bakst, one of his earliest teachers. One of the key murals was 9 feet tall by 24 feet long and included images of various lively subjects such as dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. One critic at the time called it "Hebrew jazz in paint." Chagall created it as a "storehouse of symbols and devices," notes Lewis. The murals "constituted a landmark" in the history of the theatre, and were forerunners of his later large-scale works, including murals for the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera.

Life became hard for Russians in general as famine spread after the war ended in 1918. Chagall and his family moved to a small town near Moscow which was less expensive, although he now had to commute to Moscow daily using crowded trains. In Moscow he found a job teaching art to war orphans. He spent the years between 1921 and 1922 living in primitive conditions and decided it would be necessary to move back to France which would allow his artistic expression to grow in an atmosphere of freedom. He also learned that many other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to move to the West. He therefore applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography, My Life.

France (1923—1941)

In 1923 he left Moscow to return to France. On his way there he stopped in Berlin to recover the many pictures he left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the war began, but was unable to find or recover any of them. Nonetheless, after returning to Paris he again "rediscovered the free expansion and fulfilment which were so essential to him," writes Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings.

He formed a business relationship with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. This inspired him to begin creating etchings for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's Dead Sould, the Bible, and the Fables of La Fontaine. These illustrations would eventually come to represent his finest printmaking efforts. By 1926 he had his first exhibition in the United States at the Reinhardt gallery of New York which included about 100 works, although he did not travel to the opening. He stayed in France painting ceaselessly, notes Baal-Teshuva.

During this period he traveled throughout France, "falling in love with Ĉote d’Azur." He enjoyed the landscapes, colorful vegetation, the blue Mediterranean, and the mild weather. He made repeated trips to the countryside, always taking his sketchbook.

After returning to Paris after one of his trips, Vollard commissioned him to illustrate the Old Testament version of the Bible. Although he could have completed the project in France, he chose to use the assignment as a reason to Travel to Palestine and experience for himself the Holy Land. He therefore traveled there in February 1931 and stayed for two months. Chagall felt at home in Palestine where many spoke Yiddish and Russian. According to Baal-Teshuva, "he was impressed by the pioneering spirit of the people in the kubbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and the other holy places."

He returned to France and by the following year had complete 32 out of the total of 105 plates. By 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, he had finished 66, however Vollard died that same year. When the series was completed in 1956, it was published by Edition Tériade. Baal-Teshuva writes that "the illustrations were stunning and met with great acclaim. Once again Chagall had shown himself to be one of the 20th century's most important graphic artists." Andalusian poet Rafael Alberti described his first meeting with Chagall during this period:

"He was a bit pagan, . . . something of a fawn, a satyr. He was a man truly open, free. He simply laughed. . . . Chagall was a genuine Slav, ironic, very amusing, always ready to caricature himself and others. . . . He loved acting up, a bit like Picasso. In fact he was better at it than Picasso."

After Germany invaded and occupied France, he naively remained in Vichy France, unaware that French Jews, with the help of the Vichy government, were being collected and sent to German concentration camps, from which nearly all would never return. With the help of Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art, he was saved this fate as his name was added to a list of prominent artists whose lives were at risk and that the United States should try to extricate. He left France in May 1941, "when it almost too late," adds Lewis. Picasso and Matisse were among other artists also invited to leave for America but they decided to remain in France. Chagall and Bella arrived in New York on June 23, 1941, the very day that Germany invaded Russia.

America (1941—1948)

Even before arriving in America in 1941, he had been awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1939. But soon after he was able to spend time in America he discovered that he had already achieved "international stature," writes Cogniat. However, he felt ill-suited in this new role in a foreign country, one whose language he could not yet speak. He became a public figure mostly against his will, feeling lost in the strange surroundings.

To compound his discomfort in America was his knowing that he left France under Nazi occupation and the fate of millions of Jews was at risk. By coincidence, it also turned out that on the very day his shipped arrived in New York, and his first view of the the Statue of Liberty, the German army had marched into his homeland country of Russia. After a while he began to settle down in in New York which was full of writers, painters, and composers who, like himself, had fled from Europe during the Nazi invasions. He spent time visiting galleries and museums, and befriending other painters including Piet Mondrian and André Breton.

Baal-Teshuva writes that Chagall loved going to the sections of New York where the Jews lived, especially in the Lower East Side. There he felt at home, enjoying the Jewish foods and being able to read the Yiddish press, which became his main source of information since he did not yet speak English.

Contemporary artists did not yet understand or even like Chagall's art. According to Baal-Teshuva, "they had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." And the Paris School, which was referred to as 'Parisian Surrealism,' meant little to them. Those attitudes among his fellow artists would begin to change, however, when Pierre Matisse, the son of recognized French artist Henri Matisse, became his representative and held Chagall exhibitions in New York and Chicago in 1941. One of the earliest exhibitions included 21 of his materpieces from 1910 to 1941. Art critic Henry McBride wrote about this exhibit for the New York Sun:

"Chagall is about as gypsy as they come . . . these pictures do more for his reputation than anythign we have previously seen. . . His colors sparkle with poetry . . . his work is authentically Russian as a Volga boatman's song. . . ."

Aleko ballet (1942)

He was offered a commission by choreographer Leonid Massine, of the New York Ballet Theatre to design the sets and costumes for his new ballet, Aleko. This ballet would stage the words of Pushkin's verse narrative The Gypsies with the music of Tchaikovsky. While Chagall had done stage settings before while in Russia, this was his first ballet. This gave Chagall a chance to travel to Mexico, where he quickly began to appreciate the "primitive ways and colorful art of the Mexicans," notes Cogniat. He found "something very closely related to his own nature," and did all the color detail for the sets while there. Eventually, he created four large backdrops and had Mexican seamstresses sew the ballet costumes.

When the ballet premiered on September 8, 1942 it was considered a "remarkable success." In the audience were other famous mural painters who came to see Chagall's work, artists such as Diego Rivera and José Orozco. According to Baal-Teshuva, when the final bar of music ended, "there was a tumultuous applause and 19 curtain calls, with Chagall himself being called back onto the stage again and again." Four weeks later the ballet opened in New York at the Metropolitan Opera and the response was repeated, "again Chagall was the hero of the evening." Art critic Edwin Denby wrote of the opening for the New York Herald Tribune:

Chagall's work "has turned into a dramatized exhibition of giant paintings . . . It surpasses anything Chagall has done on the easel scale, and it is a breathtaking experience, of a kind one hardly expects in the theatre."

However, after he returned to New York in 1943, current events took on more importance for him, and this was reflected in his art, where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. Then, in 1944, another trajedy affected him when his wife died suddenly due to a virus infection, which was not treated due to the wartime shortage of penicillin. As a result, he stopped all work for many months, and when he did resume painting his first pictures were concerned with preserving Bella's memory.

Around this same period he learned that the Germans destroyed the town where he was raised, Vitebsk, and was greatly distressed. He also heard about the concentration camps and more details about the occupation of France. Two of his artist friends who left Russia for New York but then returned, were killed by Stalin's regime.

After about a year of living alone after his wife died, he met Virginia Haggard who he hired as his housekeeper and cook. After a time their relatioship deepened into a romantic affair that lasted seven years, although they never married. They had one child together, David, in 1946. They kept their romance hidden from most of their friends.

By 1946 his artwork was becoming more widely recognized. That year the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a large exhibition with 40 years of his work, going back to his teenage years under Yehuda Pen. By doing so, the exhibit gave visitors one of the first complete impression of the changing nature of his art over the years. The war had by then ended and he began making plans to return to Paris. According to Cogniat, "He found he was even more deeply attached than before, not only to the atmosphere of Paris, but to the city itself, to its houses and its views." Chagall summed up his years living in America:

I lived here in American during the inhuman war in which humanity deserted itself . . . I have seen the rhythm of life. I have seen America fighting with Allies . . . the wealth that she has distributed to bring relief to the people who had to suffer the consequences of the war . . . I like America and the Americans . . . people there are frank. It is a young country with the qualities and faults of youth. It is a delight to love people like that . . . Above all I am impressed by the greatness of this country and the freedom that it gives.

He went back for good in the autumn of 1947, where he attended the opening of the exhibition of his works at the Musée National d'Art Moderne.

France (1948—1985)

After returning to France he traveled throughout Europe and chose to live in the Côte d'Azur which by that time had become somewhat of an "artistic centre," notes Baal-Teshuva. Matisse lived above Nice, while Picasso lived in Vallauris. Although they lived nearby and sometimes worked together, there was artistic rivalry between them as their work was so distinctly different, and they never became long-term friends. According to Picasso's mistress, Francoise Gilot, Picasso still had a great deal of respect for Chagall, and once told her,

"When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color is. . . . His canvases are really painted, not just tossed together. Some of the last things he's done in Vence convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has."

In 1951 he and Virginia traveled to Israel where he was "considered the greatest living Jewish artist," and was always welcomed with enthusiasm. The following year he and Virginia Haggard ended their relationship. His daughter Ida, however, married art historian Franz Meyer in January 1952. Ida, feeling that her father missed the companionship of a woman in his home, introduced him to Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background, who had run a successful business in London. They took to each other after she became his secretary and were married in July, 1952.

In the years ahead, with a new wife, he was able to produce not just paintings and graphic art, but also numerous sculptures and ceramics, including wall tiles, painted vases, plates and jugs. He also began working in larger-scale formats, producing large murals, stained glass windows, mosaics and tepestries.

Ceiling of the Paris Opera (1963)

In 1963 Chagall was commissioned to paint the new ceiling for Paris Opera, a majestic 19th-century building and national monument. André Malraux, France's Minister of Culture wanted something unique and decided Chagall would be the ideal artist. However, this choice of artist led to controversy: some objected to having a Russian Jew decorate a French national monument; others took exception to the ceiling of the historic building being painted by a modern artist. A few leading magazines wrote condescending articles about Chagall and Malraux. In response, Chagall commented to one writer about these attacks:

"They really had in in for me . . . It is amazing the way the French resent foreigners. You live here most of your life. You become a naturalized French citizen, . . . work for nothing decorating their cathedrals, and still they despise you. You are not one of them."

Nonetheless, Chagall remained on the project which took the 77-year-old Chagall a year to complete. The final canvas was nearly 2,400 square feet (220 sq. meters) and required 440 pounds of paint. The finished canvas had five segments which were glued to polyester panels and hoisted up to the 70-foot ceiling. The images in the canvas paid tribute to the composers Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel, as well as to famous actors and dancers.

It was presented to the public on September 23, 1964 in the presence of Malraux and 2,100 invited guests. The Paris correspondent for the New York Times was there and wrote, "For once the best seats were in the uppermost circle." Baal-Teshuva writes:

"To begin with, the big crystal chandelier hanging from the centre of the ceiling was unlit. . . . the entire corps de ballet came onto the stage, after which, in Chagall's honour, the opera's orchestra played the finale of the "Jupiter Symphony" by Mozart, Chagall's favorite composer. During the last bars of the music, the chandelier lit up, bringing the artist's ceiling painting to life in all its glory, drawing rapturous applause from the audience."

After the new ceiling was unveiled, "even the bitterest opponents of the commission seemed to fall silent," says Baal-Teshuva. "Unanimously, the press declared Chagall's new work to be a great contribution to French culture." Chagall did not disappoint the trust that Malraux had placed in him, with Malraux later saying, "What other living artist could have painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera in the way Chagall did? . . . He is above all one of the great colourists of our time . . ., many of his canvases and the Opera ceiling represent sublime images that rank among the finest poetry of our time, jusdt as Titian produced the finest poetry of his day."

As part of Chagall's speech to the opening audience, Chagall explained the meaning of the work:

" Up there in my painting I wanted to reflect, like a mirror in a bouquet, the dreams and creations of the singers and musicians, to recall the movement of the colourfully attired audience below, and to honour the great opera and ballet composers. . . . Now I offer this work as a gift of gratitude to France and her École de Paris, without which there wouild be no colour and no freedom."

Art styles and techniques

Color

According to Cogniat, in all Chagall's work during all stages of his life, it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention. In his earlier years his range was limited by his emphasis on form and his pictures never gave the impression of painted drawings. He adds, "The colors are a living, integral part of the picture and are never passively flat, or banal like an afterthought. They sculpt and animate the volume of the shapes . . . they indulge in flights of fancy and invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones. . . His colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes and rhythms."

He was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors. Cogniat writes, "Chagall is unrivalled in this ability to give a vivid impression of explosive movement with the simplest use of colors. . . " Throughout his life his colors created a "vibrant atmosphere" which was based on "his own personal vision."

Subject matters

From life memories to fantasy

Chagall's early life left him with a "powerful visual memory and a pictorial intelligence," writes Goodman. After living in France and experiencing the atmosphere of artistic freedom, his "vision soared and he created a new reality, one that drew on both his inner and outer worlds." But it was the images and memories of his early years in Russia that would sustain his art for more than seventy years.

According to Cogniat, there are certain elements in his art that have remained permanent and seen throughout his career. One of those was his choice of subjects and the way they were portrayed. He writes that "the most obviously constant element is his gift for happiness and his instinctive compassion, which even in the most serious subjects prevents him from dramatization . . ." Musicians have been a constant during all stages of his work. After he first got married, "lovers have sought each other, ebraced, caressed, floated through the air, met in wreaths of flowers, stretched, and swooped like the melodious passage of their vivid day-dreams. Acrobats contort themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the end of their stems; flowers anf foliage abound everywhere."

His early pictures were often of the town where he was born and raised, Vitebsk. Cogniat notes that they are realistic and give the impression of firsthand experience by capturing a moment in time with action, often with a dramatic image. In his later years, as for instance in his "Bible series," his subjects were put on a loftier plane. In all his art, however, he managed to blend the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color the pictures were always at least acceptable if not powerful. He never attempted to present pure reality but always created his atmospheres through fantasy. In all cases, however, Chagall's "most persistent subject is life itself, in its simplicity or its hidden complexity. . . . He presents for our study places, people, and objects from his own life.

Jewish themes

After absorbing the techniques of Fauvism and Cubism, he was able to blend them into his own folk style, which he used to give the grim life of Hasidic Jews in the Russia of his memories the "romantic overtones of a charmed world," notes Goodman. It was by combining the aspects of Modernism with his "unique artistic language," that he was able to catch the attention of critics and collectors throughout Europe. Generally, it was his boyhood living in a Russian provincial town that gave him a continual source of imaginative stimuli. Chagall would also become one of many other Jewish emigrés to become noted artists, all of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most numerous and creative minorities."

World War I, which ended in 1918, had displaced nearly a million Jews and destroyed what remained of the provincial shtetl culture that had defined life for most Eastern European Jews for centuries. Goodman notes, "The fading of traditional Jewish society left artists like Chagall with powerful memories that could no longer be fed by a tangible reality. Instead, that culture became an emotional and intellectual source that existed solely in memory and the imagination. . . . So rich had the experience been, it sustained him for the rest of his life." Sweeney adds that "if you ask Chagall to explain his paintings, he would reply, 'I don't understand them at all. They are not literature. They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me. . . "

Chagall had a complex relationship with Judaism. On the one hand, he credited his Russian Jewish cultural background as being crucial to his artistic imagination. But however ambivalent he was about his religion, he could not avoid drawing upon his Jewish past for artistic material. As an adult, he was not a practicing Jew, but through his paintings and stained glass, he continually tried to suggest a more "universal message," using both Jewish and Christian themes.

According to Lewis, "he remains the most important visual artist to have borne witness to the world of East European Jewry . . . and inadvertently became the public witness of a now vanished civilization." Although Judaism has religious inhibitions about pictorial art of many religious subjects, Chagall managed to use his fantasy images as a form of visual metaphor combined with folk imagery. His "Fiddler on the Roof," for example, combines a folksy village setting with a fiddler as a way to show the Jewish love of music as important to the Jewish spirit.

As art historian Franz Meyer points out that one of the main reasons for the unconventional nature of his work is related to the hassidic movement which inspired the world of his childhood and youth and had actually impressed itself on most Eastern European Jews since the eighteenth century. He writes, "For Chagall this is one of the deepest sources, not of inspiration, but of a certain spiritual attitude. . . . the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment of his art."

In a talk that Chagall gave in 1963 while visiting America, he discussed some of those subjects:

For about two thousand years a reserve of energy has fed and supported us, and filled our lives, but during the last century a split has opened in this reserve, and it components have begun to disintegrate: God, perspective, colour, the Bible, shape, line, traditions, the so-called humanities, love, devotion, family, school, education, the prophets and Christ himself. Have I too, perhaps, doubted in my time? I painted pictures upside down, decapitated people and dissected them, scattering the pieces in the air, all in the name of another perspective, another kind of picture composition and another formalism.

Other types of art

Stained Glass windows

One of Chagall's major contributions to art have been his work with stained glass. This medium allowed him to further express his desire to create intense and fresh colors and had the added benefit of natural light and refraction interacting and constantly changing. Everything from the position where the view stood to the weather outside would alter the visual affect.

It was not until 1956, when he was nearly 70-years of age, that he designed windows for the church at Assy, his first major project. From 1958 to 1960 he created windows for the Metz Cathedral. In 1978 he took on creating windows for St. Stephen's church in Mainz, Germany. 200,000 visitors a year visit the church. "Tourists from the whole world pilgrim up St. Stephen’s Mount, to the glowing blue stained glass windows by the artist Marc Chagall," states the city's web site. "St. Stephen’s is the only German church for which the Jewish artist Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985) created windows."

The website also states, “The colours address our vital consciousness directly, because they tell of optimism, hope and delight in life”, says Monsignor Klaus Mayer, who imparts Chagall’s work in mediations and books. He established contact with Chagall in 1973, and succeeded in persuading the “master of colour and the biblical message” to set a sign for Jewish-Christian attachment and international understanding. In 1978, at the age of 91, Chagall fitted the first window and eight more followed.

In 1960, he created stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem, which Cogniat considers to be "his greatest work in this field" of stained glass. Each window would depict one of the Twelve tribes of Israel. During the Six-Day War the hospital came under severe attack, placing Chagall's work under threat. In response to this, Chagall wrote a letter from France stating "I am not worried about the windows, only about the safety of Israel. Let Israel be safe and I will make you lovelier windows." Only one window was damaged. In 1973, Israel issued a series of stamps commemorating the windows.

In 1964 Chagall created a stained-glass window, entitled "Peace," for the United Nations in honor of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN's second secretary general who was killed in a plane crash in Africa in 1961. The window is about 15 feet wide and 12 feet high and contains symbols of peace and love along with musical symbols.

In 1967 he dedicated a stained-glass window to John D. Rockefeller in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York.

Murals, theater sets and costumes

Chagall first worked on stage designs in 1914 while living in Russia. It was during this period in the Russian theatre that formerly static ideas of stage design were, according to Cogniat, "being swept away in favor of a wholly arbitrary sense of space with different dimensions, perspectives, colors and rhythms." These changes appealed to Chagall who had been experimenting with Cubism and wanted a way to enliven his images. Designing murals and stage designs, Chagall's "dreams sprang to life and became an actual movement."

As a result, Chagall played an important role in Russian artistic life during that time and "was one of the most important forces in the current urge towards anti-realism" which helped the new Russia's invent "astonishing" creations. Many of his designs were done for the Jewish Theatre in Moscow which put on numerous Jewish plays by playwrights such as Gogol and Singe. Chagall's set designs helped create illusory atmospheres which were the essence of the theatrical performances.

After leaving Russia 20 years passed before he was again offered a chance to design theatre sets. In the years between, his paintings still included harlequins, clowns and acrobats, which Cogniat notes "convey his sentimental attachment to and nostalgia for the theatre." His first assignment designing sets after Russia was for the ballet "Aleko" in 1942, while living in America. Again, in 1945, he was commissioned to design the sets and costumes for Stravinsky's "The Firebird." These designs contributed greatly towards his enhanced reputation in America as a leading artist.

Cogniat describes how Chagall's designs "immerse the spectator in a luminous, colored fairy-land where forms are mistily defined and the spaces themselves seem animated with whirlwinds or explosions." His technique of using theatrical color in this way reached its peak when Chagall returned to Paris and designed the sets for Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloë" in 1958. In 1964 he repainted the ceiling of the Paris Opera using 2,400 square feet of canvas.

In 1966 he painted two monumental murals for the outside of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The pieces were titled "the Sources of Music" and "The Triumph of Music," which were completed in France and shipped to New York.

Tapestries

Chagall also designed tapestries which were woven under the direction of Yvette Cauquil-Prince, who also collaborated with Picasso. These tapestries are much rarer than his paintings, with only 40 of them ever reaching the commercial market. Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12 floor mosaics and a wall mosaic.

Ceramics and sculpture

Chagall began learning about ceramics and sculpture while living in south France. Ceramics became a fashion in the Cote d'Azur with various workshops starting up at Antibes, Vence and Vallauris. He took classes along with other known artists including Picasso and Fernand Léger. At first Chagall painted existing pieces of pottery but soon expanded into designing his own, which began his work as a sculptor as a compliment to his painting.

After experimenting with pottery and dishes he moved into large ceramic murals. However, he was never satisfied with the limits imposed by the square tile segments which Cogniat notes "imposed on him a discipline which prevented the creation of a plastic image."

Exhibitions

• In 1967 the Louvre in Paris exhibited 17 large-scale paintings and 38 gouaches, under the title of "Message Biblique," which he donated to the nation of France on condition that a museum was to be built for them in Nice. In 1969 work began on the museum, called Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall. It was completed and inaugurated in July 7, 1973, on Chagall's birthday. Today it contains monumental paintings on biblical themes, three stained-glass windows, tapestries, a large mosaic and numerous gouaches for the "Bible series."

• From 1969 to 1970 the Grand Palais in Paris held the largest Chagall exhibition to date, including 474 works. The exhibition was called "Hommage a Marc Chagall," was opened by the French President and "proved an enormous success with the public and critics alike."

• In 1973 he traveled to Russia, his first visit back since he left in 1922. The Tretiakov gallery in Moscow held a special exhibition for the occasion of his visit. He was able to see again the murals he long ago made for the Jewish Theatre. In St. Petersburg, he was reunited with two of his sisters, whom he had not seen since for over 50 years.

• In 1982 in Stockholm Sweden the Moderna Museet organized a retrospective exhibition which later traveled to Denmark.

• In 1985 the Royal Academy in London presented a major retrospective which later moved to Philadelphia. Chagall was too old to attend the London opening and died a few months later.

Current exhibits

• Chagall's work is housed in a variety of locations, including the Palais Garnier (the old opera house), the Chase Tower Plaza of downtown Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, the Metz Cathedral, Notre-Dame de Reims, the Fraumünster abbey in Zürich, Switzerland, the Church of St. Stephan in Mainz, Germany and the Biblical Message museum in Nice, France, which Chagall helped to design.

• The only church in England with a complete set of Chagall window-glass is located in the tiny village of Tudeley, in Kent, England.

• Twelve stained-glass windows are part of Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, Israel. Each frame depicts a different tribe.

• In the United States, the Union Church of Pocantico Hills contains a set of Chagall windows commemorating the prophets, which was commissioned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. [3].

• The Lincoln Center in New York City, contains Chagall's huge murals, The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music, are installed in the lobby of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966. Also in New York, the United Nations Headquarters has a stained glass wall of his work. In 1967 the UN commemorated this artwork with a postage stamp and souvenir sheet.

• In 2007, an exhibition of his work titled "Chagall of Miracles," was held at Il Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome, Italy.

Final years and death

In a recent book review of Chagall's biography, author Serena Davies writes, "By the time he died in France in 1985 - the last surviving master of European modernism, outliving Joan Miró by two years - he had experienced at first hand the high hopes and crushing disappointments of the Russian revolution, and had witnessed the end of the Pale, the near annihilation of European Jewry, and the obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a population of 240,000 survived the Second World War."

She later adds that the book "leaves us finally with an image of a man who came from nowhere to achieve world-wide acclaim. Yet his fractured relationship with his Jewish identity - he was physically divorced from his homeland, and he wasn't a practising Jew - was unresolved and tragic. He would have died with no Jewish rites, had not a stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over his coffin."

Legacy and influence

The family home on Pokrovskaya Street is now the Marc Chagall Museum.

See also

• I and the Village
• La Mariée (The Bride)

Bibliography

• Alexander, Sidney, Marc Chagall: A Biography G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978.
• Monica Bohm-Duchen, Chagall (Art & Ideas) Phaidon 1998. ISBN 0714831603
• Chagall, Marc, My Life Peter Owen Ltd, 1965 (2003) ISBN 978-0720611861

• Compton, Susann, Chagall Harry N. Abrams, 1985.
• Harshav, Benjamin, ed. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003 ISBN 0804748306
• Kamensky, Aleksandr, Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia, Trilistnik, Moscow, 2005 (In Russian)
• Kamensky, Aleksandr, Chagall: The Russian Years 1907-1922., Rizzoli, NY, 1988 (Abridged version of Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia) ISBN 0847810801
• Nikolaj, Aaron, Marc Chagall., (Monographie) Reinbek 2003 (In German)
• Shishanov V.A. Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art - a history of creation and a collection. 1918-1941. - Minsk: Medisont, 2007. - 144 p.[4]
• Wilson, Jonathan Marc Chagall, Schocken, 2007 ISBN 0805242015
• Wullschlager, Jackie. Chagall: A Biography Knopf, 2008

External links

• Official site of Marc Chagall Museum in Vitebsk, Belarus
• Official site of Marc Chagall Museum in Nice, France
• Marc Chagall at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
• Marc Chagall at Olga's Gallery
• Pictures of: Me and My Village, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, and Chagall's illustrations to the Bible: Song of Songs III (1960), Jacob's Dream (1954-67), Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (1954-67), and Abraham and the Three Angels (1954-67)
• Column about revivals of "Fiddler on the Roof"
• Marc Chagall Website
• Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Marc Chagall. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

Video slideshows

• Slideshow 8 min., music by Itzak Perlman
• Slideshow 10 min. with modern music
• Chagall windows in Jerusalem Israel, 1.5 min. with music
• "Shagal's Passion" Russian-made animation about Chagall, 7 minutes with European music
• Slideshow 6 min., with classical music
• Slideshow Spain, 5 min. with music
• Slideshow - Daphnis and Chloe lithographs France, 8 min., music by Revel

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