Marc Chagall.html



Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1941
Birth name	Moshe Shagal
Born	7 July 1887 Liozna, Russian Empire (now in Belarus)
Died	28 March 1985 (aged 97) Saint-Paul de Vence, France
Nationality	Russian-French
Field	Painting
Training	St. Petersburg Society of Art Supporters, Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting
Movement	Surrealism, Expressionism
Works	see List of Chagall's artwork

Marc Chagall (Yiddish: מאַרק שאַגאַל‎; Belarusian: Мойша Захаравіч Шагалаў Mojša Zaharavič Šagałaŭ; Russian: Марк Захарович Шага́л Mark Zakharovich Shagal) (7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian Jewish artist associated with several Modernist art movements of the 20th century.

Biography

Marc Chagall was born in Liozno, near Vitebsk, now in Belarus, the eldest of nine children in a close-knit Jewish family led by his father Khatskl (Zakhar) Shagal, a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite. This period of his life, described as happy though impoverished, appears in references throughout Chagall's work. The family home on Pokrovskaya Street is now the Marc Chagall Museum.¹

He began studying painting in 1906 with a local artist, Yehuda Pen. In 1907, he moved to to St. Petersburg. There he joined the school of the Society of Art Supporters and studied under Nikolai Roerich. It was here that he was exposed to experimental theater and the work of such artists as Gauguin.² From 1908-1910 Chagall studied under Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting.

This was a difficult period for Chagall; at the time, Jewish residents were only allowed to live in St. Petersburg with a permit, and the artist was jailed for a brief period for an infringement of this restriction. Despite this, Chagall remained in St. Petersburg until 1910, and regularly visited his home town where, in 1909, he met his future wife, Bella Rosenfeld.

After gaining a reputation as an artist, Chagall left St. Petersburg to settle in Paris to be near the burgeoning art community in the Montparnasse district, where he developed friendships with such avant-garde luminaries as Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger. In 1914, he returned to Vitebsk and, a year later, married his fiancée, Bella. While in Russia, World War I erupted and, in 1916, the Chagalls had their first child, a daughter named Ida.

Chagall became an active participant in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although the Soviet Ministry of Culture made him a Commissar of Art for the Vitebsk region, where he founded Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and an art school, he did not fare well politically under the Soviet system. He and his wife moved to Moscow in 1920 and then back to Paris three years later, in 1923. During this period, Chagall published his memoirs in Yiddish, which were originally written in Russian and translated into French by Bella. He also wrote articles, poetry and memoirs in Yiddish, published mainly in newspapers (and only posthumously in book-form). Chagall became a French citizen in 1937.

With the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and the deportation of Jews, the Chagalls fled Paris, seeking asylum at Villa Air-Bel in Marseille, where the American journalist Varian Fry assisted in their escape from France through Spain and Portugal. In 1941, the Chagalls settled in the United States.

Bella, who appears in many of his paintings, died on September 2, 1944. In 1945, he began a relationship with his housekeeper Virginia Haggard McNeil, with whom he had a son, David, the following year. In the 1950s, they moved to a villa in Provence. ³At this time, Chagall rediscovered a free and vibrant use of color. His works of this period are dedicated to love and the joy of life, with curved, sinuous figures. He also began to work in sculpture, ceramics, and stained glass.

I and the Village, 1911, oil on canvas

When Virginia left him in 1952, Chagall married Valentina Brodsky (whom he called "Vava"). He traveled several times to Greece and visited Israel in 1957. At the age of 97, Chagall died in Saint-Paul de Vence on the French Riviera on 28 March 1985 and was buried at the local cemetery.

Artistic career

Chagall took inspiration from Belarusian folk-life, and portrayed many Biblical themes that reflected his Jewish heritage. In 1950 he began experimenting with graphic mediums. After meeting with Fernand Mourlot, he often visited Mourlot Studios where he eventually produced close to a thousand different lithographic editions. With the assistance of Charles Sorlier, a master printer working at Mourlot, he spent 30 years exploring the graphic medium that most lends itself to color representation. Charles Sorlier also became one of his closest friends, assistant and counsel until the day of his death.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Chagall engaged in a series of large-scale projects involving public spaces and important civic and religious buildings.

Chagall's artworks are difficult to categorize. Working in the pre-World War I Paris art world, he was involved with avant-garde currents, however, his work was consistently on the fringes of popular art movements and emerging trends, including Cubism and Fauvism, among others. He was closely associated with the Paris School and its exponents, including Amedeo Modigliani.

Abounding with references to his childhood, Chagall's work has also been criticized for slighting some of the turmoil which he experienced. He communicates happiness and optimism to those who view his work strictly in terms of his use of highly vivid colors. Chagall often posed himself, sometimes together with his wife, as an observer of a colored world like that seen through a stained-glass window. Some see The White Crucifixion, which is rich with intriguing detail, as a denunciation of the Stalin regime, the Nazi Holocaust, and the oppression of Jews in general.

Motifs and symbolism

The Fiddler, 1912-1913

• Cow: life par excellence: milk, meat, leather, horn, power.
• Tree: another life symbol.
• Cock (rooster): fertility, often painted together with lovers.
• Bosom (often naked): eroticism and fertility of life (Chagall loved and respected women).
• Fiddler: in Chagall's town Vitebsk the fiddler made music at crosspoints of life (birth, wedding, death).
• Herring (often also painted as a flying fish): commemorates Chagall's father working in a fish factory.
• Pendulum Clock: time, and modest life (in the time of prosecution at the Loire River the pendulum seems being driven with force into the wooden box of the pendulum clock).
• Candlestick: two candles symbolize the Shabbat or the Menorah (candlestick with seven candles) or the Hanukkah-candlestick, and therefore the life of pious Jews (Chassidim).
• Windows: Chagall's Love of Freedom, and Paris through the window.
• Houses of Vitebsk (often in paintings of his time in Paris): feelings for his homeland.
• Scenes of the Circus: Harmony of Man and Animal, which induces Creativity in Man.
• Crucifixion: an unusual subject for a Jewish painter, and likely a response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the late 1930s.⁴
• Horses: Freedom.
• Eiffel Tower: Up in the sky, freedom.

Theater sets and costumes

After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Jewish theater became a catalyst for modernist experimentation. Chagall and other artists were hired to produce theater sets and costumes combining Russian folk art with elements of Cubo-Futurism and Constructivism. ⁵

Stained glass windows

Chagall commemorative stamp

In 1960, he created stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem. 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." Luckily, most of the panels were removed in time, with only one sustaining severe damage. In 1973, Israel issued a series of stamps featuring the Chagall windows, which depict the Twelve tribes, such as Levi, pictured there.

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. ⁶Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12 floor mosaics and a wall mosaic. ⁷

Etchings

In 1930, Chagall was commissioned to do a series of Bible prints by Parisian art dealer Ambroise Vollard. Chagall spent three months in Palestine to paint preparatory gouaches. He completed 66 of the plates by 1939, and returned to the project 13 years later, after the Holocaust. These hand-colored etchings, completed in 1956, illustrated scenes from the Old Testament in Chagall's unique style. ⁸

Exhibits and traveling shows

Bella with White Collar, 1917

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. Chagall painted 12 colorful stained-glass windows in Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, with each frame depicting 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. [1].

Pasqualina Azzarello's tribute mural

At the Lincoln Center in New York City, 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.⁹

In 1973, the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall (Chagall Museum) opened in Nice, France. The museum in Vitebsk which bears his name was founded in 1997, in the building where his family lived, although, prior to his death, years before the fall of the Soviet Bloc, Chagall was persona non grata in his homeland. The museum has only copies of his work.

In 2007, an exhibition of his work, “Chagall of Miracles,” at Il Complesso del Vittoriano, included the Red Jew (1915), Above the City (1914-1918), Composition with Circles and Goat (1920), and The Fall of the Angel (1923-1947). Despite the fact that he was a Jew, he employed Christian iconography. He was also a dreamer whose works touched on the harsh realities of war and persecution. The works in this exhibition highlighted these aspects of Chagall's work. ¹⁰

Quotations

• "All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites."

• "Great art picks up where nature ends."

• "I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension."

• "I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment."

• "If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste."

• “If I were not a Jew…I wouldn’t have been an artist, or I would be a different artist altogether.”

• "In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love."

• "My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent."

• "Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?"

• "Will there be any more?"

• "We all know that a good person can be a bad artist. But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one."

• "Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love."

References

Bibliography

• Nikolaj Aaron, Marc Chagall., (Monographie) Reinbek 2003 (In German)
• Benjamin Harshav, ed. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003 ISBN 0804748306
• Aleksandr Kamensky, Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia, Trilistnik, Moscow, 2005 (In Russian)
• Aleksandr Kamensky, Chagall: The Russian Years 1907-1922., Rizzoli, NY, 1988 (Abridged version of Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia) ISBN 0847810801
• Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall, Schocken, 2007 ISBN 0805242015
• "Shishanov V.A.Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art a history of creation and a collection. 1918-1941. - Minsk: Medisont, 2007. - 144 p.[2]
• Marc Chagall: A Biography, by Jackie Wullschlanger, Knopf, 2008

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Marc Chagall

Ballet portal

• 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"
• The Green Fiddler
• Marc Chagall Website