Marc Chagall (Yiddish: מאַרק שאַגאַל;
Russian: Марк Захарович Шага́л; Belarusian: Мойша Захаравіч Шагалаў Mojša Zacharavič Šahałaŭ) (7
July 1887 – 28 March 1985)
was a French painter of Russian-Jewish origin who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Among the celebrated painters of the
20th century, he is associated with the modern movements after impressionism.
Biography
Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal (משה שאגאל - Shagal is a dialectal, North-Eastern Yiddish variant of the surname "Segal", an acronym of סגן לוי Segan Levi, meaning
"Assistant Levite"); his name was rendered in the Russian
language as Mark Zakharovich Shagalov. Chagall was born in Vitebsk,
Russian Empire (now in Belarus), the oldest of nine
children in the close-knit Jewish family led by his father, a herring merchant Khatskl (Zakhar) Shagal, and his mother, Feige-Ite. This
period of his life, described as happy though impoverished, appears in references throughout Chagall's work.
Beginning to study painting in 1906 under famed local artist Yehuda
Pen, Chagall moved to St. Petersburg only a few months later in 1907. There he joined the school of the Society of Art Supporters and studied under Nikolai Roerich, encountering artists of every school and style. From 1908-1910 he studied under Leon Bakst at
Zvantseva's School.
Marc Chagall,
I and the Village,
1911, oil on canvas.
This period was difficult for Chagall — Jewish residents at the time could only live in St. Petersburg with a permit, and he
was jailed for a brief time. Chagall remained in St. Petersburg until 1910, and regularly visited
his home town where in 1909 he met his future wife, Bella
Rosenfeld.
After becoming known as an artist, he left St. Petersburg to settle in Paris in
order to be near the art community of the Montparnasse district, where he became a friend
of Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert
Delaunay, and Fernand Léger. In 1914, he returned to
Vitebsk and a year later married his fiancée, Bella. World War I erupted while Chagall was
in Russia. In 1916, the Chagalls had a daughter, Ida.
Chagall became an active participant in the Russian Revolution of 1917. The
Soviet Ministry of Culture made him a Commissar of Art for the Vitebsk region, where he
founded an art school. He did not fare well politically under the Soviet system. He and his
wife moved to Moscow in 1920 and back to Paris in 1923. During this period, he published memoirs in
Yiddish, which were originally written in Russian and translated into French by Bella Chagall; he also
wrote articles, poetry and memoirs in Yiddish, published mainly in newspapers (and only
posthumously in a book form). He became a French citizen in 1937.
With the Nazi occupation of France during
World War II, and the deportation of Jews and the Holocaust, the Chagalls fled Paris. He hid at Villa Air-Bel in
Marseille and the American journalist Varian Fry assisted his escape from France through
Spain and Portugal. In 1941, the Chagalls settled in the
United States of America.
On September 2, 1944, his beloved Bella, the constant subject of his paintings and companion of his life, died from an illness. Two years
later in 1946 he returned to Europe. By 1949 he was working in Provence, France. The same year, Chagall took part in the creation of the MRAP
anti-racist NGO.
Lifted, he was able to rise out of his depression when he met Virginia Haggard, with whom he had a son, and was also aided by
the theatrical commissions he got. During these intense years, he rediscovered a free and vibrant 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.
Chagall remarried in 1952 to Valentina Brodsky (whom he called "Vava"). He traveled several times to Greece, and in 1957 visited Israel, where in 1960 he created stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem and
in 1966, wall art for the new parliament being constructed in that
city.
During the Six Day War the hospital came
under severe attack and Chagall's paintings came under threat. In response to this Chagall famously 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, only one of them was damaged as most of the windows were taken down in time.
At the age of 97, Marc died in Saint-Paul de Vence, France on March 28, 1985. At the cemetery of Saint-Paul de
Vence, he was buried. His plot is the most westerly aisle upon entering the cemetery.
Art of Chagall
Bella with white collar, 1917
Chagall took inspiration from Belarusian folk-life, and portrayed many Biblical themes reflecting his Jewish heritage. In the
1960s and 1970s, Chagall involved himself in large-scale projects involving public spaces and important civic and religious
buildings.
Chagall's works fit into several modern art categories. He took part in the movements of the Paris art world which preceded
World War I and was thus involved with avant-garde currents. However, his work always found
itself on the margins of these movements and emerging trends, including Cubism and
Fauvism. He was closely associated with the Paris
School and its exponents, including Amedeo Modigliani.
His works abound with references to his childhood, yet often neglect some of the turmoil which he experienced. He communicates
happiness and optimism to those who view his works by means of highly vivid colors. Chagall often posed himself, sometimes
together with his wife, as an observer of the world — a colored world like that seen through a stained-glass window. Some see
The White Crucifixion, which abounds in rich, intriguing detail, as a
denunciation of the Stalin regime, the Nazi Holocaust, and all oppression of the Jews.
Often used symbols in Chagall's works of art
- Cow: life par excellence: milk, meat, leather, horn, power.
- Tree: another life symbol.
- Cock: 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 of Jesus: an unusual subject for a Jewish painter, and likely a response to the rise of anti-Semitism in
Germany in the late 1930s.[1]
- Horses: Freedom.
- The Eiffel Tower: Up in the sky, freedom.
Chagall and his works today
His work is in a variety of locations, such as the Palais Garnier (the old opera
house), the Chase Tower Plaza of downtown
Chicago, the Metropolitan
Opera, the cathedral of Metz, France, Notre-Dame de Reims, the Fraumünster abbey in Zürich, Switzerland, the Church of St. Stephan in Mainz, Germany and the delightful Biblical Message museum in Nice, France, that
Chagall helped to design. The only church known in the entire world with a full set of Chagall window-glass, is in the tiny
village of Tudeley, in Kent,
England. Chagall painted 12 colorful stained-glass windows in Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in
Jerusalem. Each frame depicts a different tribe.
Exhibitions and tributes
Marc Chagall stained-glass window at the U.N. in New York City.
Pasqualina Azzarello's tribute mural
Anyone who has visited Lincoln Center in New York City is familiar with the huge mosaic murals 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 art with both a postage stamp and a souvenir sheet.[2]
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 on 29 Pokrovskaia street — though until his death, years before the
fall of the Soviet Bloc, he was persona non
grata in his homeland. The museum only has copies of his work.
Jon Anderson, singer from the popular group Yes, met Chagall in the town of Opio, France
as a young musician. Jon credits him as a seminal inspiration. He has recorded a piece of music named Chagall, in his honor; and
named the charitable Opio Foundation he established for the connection.
In 1997, Pasqualina Azzarello painted A Celebration of Imagination: a Tribute to Marc
Chagall, a 15'x30' public mural in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In 2005, musician Tori Amos recorded and released the composition "Garlands," with lyrics
inspired by a series of Chagall lithographs.
Chagall quotes
- "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."
- "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?"
- "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 interest me, and I am only in contact with things I love."
List of well-known works
- Young Woman on a Sofa (Mariaska), 1907, (Private collection)
- The Wedding, 1910
- The Birth, 1910, Kunsthaus Zürich
- I and the Village, 1911, New York,
Museum of Modern Art
- Adam and Eve, 1912
- Paris through the window, 1913, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
- Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1913, Stedelijk
Museum, Amsterdam
- The Violinist, 1911–1914, Düsseldorf, Germany, Kunstsammlung NRW
- The Birthday, 1915, New York, Museum of Modern Art
- Bella with White Collar, 1917
- The Blue House, 1917–1920
- The Tailor, 1922
- The Fall of the Angels, 1923–1947, Kunstmuseum Basel
- Green Violinist, 1923–1924, Guggenheim Museum
- Dream Village, 1929, San Antonio, TX, McNay Art
Museum
- The Female Acrobat, 1930, Paris, Musée
National d´Art Moderne
- Solitude, 1933, Tel Aviv Museum
- Midsummer Night's Dream, 1939
- The Red Rooster, 1940, Cincinnati Art Museum
- Madonna with sleighs, 1947, Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam
- La Mariée (The Bride), 1950 — featured in the
1999 film Notting Hill
- Lovers in the Red Sky, 1950
- Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law, 1950–1952
- The Green Night, 1952
- The Bastille, 1953
- Bridge over the Seine, 1954, Hamburger Kunsthalle
- Champ de mars, 1954–1955, Museum Folkwang, Essen
- The Crossing of the Red Sea, 1955
- Commedia dell'arte, 1959 (Opern-
und Schauspielhaus Frankfurt, Foyer)
- Self-portrait, 1959–1960
- King David, 1961
- Ceiling of the Garnier Opera, 1964
- Exodus, 1952–1966
- War, 1964–1966, Kunsthaus Zürich
- Mosaic murals in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 1966
- Stage settings for Die Zauberflöte, Metropolitan Opera, New York,
1967
- Biblical-themed windows, 1968, Metz Cathedral
- The Prophet Jeremiah, 1968
- Job, 1975
- Biblical Message, 17 Works (Nice, Musée National)
- America Windows, 1977, Art Institute of
Chicago
- The Yellow Donkey, 1979
- Biblical-themed windows, 1974, Reims Cathedral
- Family, (1975–1976)
- Nine biblical-themed windows in luminous blue, 1978–1985,
St. Stephan Church, Mainz, Germany
- The Great Parade, 1979–1980, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York.
- The White Crucifixion 1938
- The Jerusalem Windows
- Four Seasons, 1974, Chase Tower, Chicago, Illinois [1]
- Scene de Cirque, 1980
- The Yellow Crucifixion 1943
References
Books
- Nikolaj Aaron, Marc Chagall., (rororo-Monographie) Reinbek 2003 (In German)
- Benjamin Harshav, ed. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003
- 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)
- Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall, Schocken, 2007
- Bill Wyman shoots Chagall (Genesis
Publications, 1998)
External links
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