Marc Chagall

Belorussian-born French artist

Marc Chagall, (born July 7, 1887, Vitebsk, Belorussia, Russian

Empire [now in Belarus]—died March 28, 1985, Saint-Paul, Alpes-
Maritimes, France), Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker,
and designer who composed his images based on emotional and
poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic.
Predating Surrealism, his early works, such as I and the
Village (1911), were among the first expressions of psychic reality
in modern art. His works in various media include sets for plays
and ballets, etchings illustrating the Bible, and stained-glass
windows.

Early life and works

Chagall was born in a small city in the western Russian Empire not
far from the Polish frontier. His family, which included eight other
children, was devoutly Jewish and, like the majority of the some
20,000 Jews in Vitebsk, humble without being poverty-stricken;
his father worked in a herring warehouse, and his mother ran a
shop where she sold fish, flour, sugar, and spices. The young
Chagall attended the heder (Jewish elementary school) and later
went to the local public school, where instruction was in Russian.
After learning the elements of drawing at school, he
studied painting in the studio of a local realist, Jehuda Pen, and in
1907 went to St. Petersburg, where he studied intermittently for
three years, eventually under the stage designer Léon Bakst.
Characteristic works by Chagall from this period of early maturity
are the nightmarish The Dead Man (1908), which depicts a roof
violinist (a favourite motif), and My Fiancée with Black
Gloves (1909), in which a portrait becomes an occasion for the
artist to experiment with arranging black and white.

In 1910, with a living allowance provided by a St. Petersburg

patron, Chagall went to Paris. After a year and a half in
Montparnasse, he moved into a studio on the edge of town in the
ramshackle settlement for bohemian artists that was known as La
Ruche (“the Beehive”). There, he met the avant-garde poets Blaise
Cendrars, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire, as well as a
number of young painters destined to become famous:
the Expressionist Chaim Soutine, the abstract colourist Robert
Delaunay, and the Cubists Albert Gleizes, Jean
Metzinger, Fernand Léger, and André Lhote. In such company
nearly every sort of pictorial audacity was encouraged, and Chagall
responded to the stimulus by rapidly developing the poetic and
seemingly irrational tendencies he had begun to display in Russia.
At the same time, under the influence of the Impressionist, Post-
Impressionist, and Fauvist pictures he saw in Paris museums and
commercial galleries, he gave up the usually sombre palette he had
employed at home.

Maturity

The four years of his first stay in the French capital are often
considered Chagall’s best phase. Representative works are Self-
Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912), I and the
Village (1911), Hommage à Apollinaire (1911–
12), Calvary (1912), The Fiddler (1912), and Paris Through the
Window (1913). In these pictures Chagall was already essentially
the artist he would continue to be for the next 60 years. His
colours, although occasionally thin, were beginning to show the
characteristic complexity and resonance he would eventually
achieve. The often whimsical figurative elements, frequently
upside down, are distributed on the canvas in an arbitrary fashion,
producing an effect that sometimes resembles a film montage and
suggests the inner space of a reverie. The general atmosphere of
these works can imply a Yiddish joke, a Russian fairy tale, or a
vaudeville turn. Often the principal character is the romantically
handsome, curly-haired young painter himself. Memories of
childhood and of Vitebsk were major sources of imagery for
Chagall during this period.
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall, with Le roi David (King David; 1951) in the background.

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After exhibiting in the annual Paris Salon des

Indépendants and Salon d’Automne, Chagall had his first solo
show in Berlin in 1914, in the gallery of
the Modernist publication Der Sturm, and he made a strong
impression on German Expressionist circles. After visiting the
exhibition, he went on to Vitebsk, where he was stranded by the
outbreak of World War I. Working for the moment in a
relatively realistic style, Chagall painted local scenes and a series
of studies of old men; examples of the series are The Praying
Jew (or The Rabbi of Vitebsk, 1914) and Jew in Green (1914). In
1915 he married Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Vitebsk
merchant; among the many paintings in which she appears from
this date onward are the depiction of flying lovers
entitled Birthday (1915–23) and the high-spirited,
acrobatic Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1917).

Chagall was initially enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of

October 1917; he became commissar for art in the Vitebsk region
and launched into ambitious projects for a local art academy and
museum. But after two and a half years of intense activity, marked
by increasingly bitter aesthetic and political quarrels with the
faculty of the art academy, he gave up and moved to Moscow.
There he turned his attention for a while to the stage, producing
the sets and costumes for plays by the Jewish writer Sholem
Aleichem and murals for the Kamerny Theatre. In 1922 Chagall
left Russia for good, going first to Berlin, where he discovered that
a large number of the pictures he had left behind in 1914 had
disappeared. In 1923, this time with a wife and daughter, he
settled once again in Paris.

Chagall had learned the techniques of engraving while in Berlin.

Through his friend Cendrars he met the Paris art dealer and
publisher Ambroise Vollard, who in 1923 commissioned him to
create a series of etchings to illustrate a special edition of Nikolay
Gogol’s novel Dead Souls, and thus launched Chagall on a long
career as a printmaker. During the next three years, Chagall
executed 107 full-page plates for the Gogol book. By then Vollard
had a new idea: an edition of French poet Jean de La
Fontaine’s Fables, with coloured illustrations resembling 18th-
century prints. Chagall prepared 100 gouaches for reproduction,
but it soon became evident that his colours were too complex for
the printing process envisaged. He switched to black-and-white
etchings, completing the plates in 1931. By this time Vollard had
come up with still another commission: a series of etchings
illustrating the Bible. Chagall had completed 66 plates by 1939,
when World War II and the death of Vollard halted work on the
project; with the project renewed in the postwar years, Chagall
eventually completed 105 plates. The Paris publisher E. Tériade,
picking up where Vollard had left off, issued Dead Souls in 1948
(with 11 more etchings for the chapter headings, making 118 in
all), La Fontaine’s Fables in 1952 (with two cover etchings, making
102 in all), and the Bible in 1956. Along with these much delayed
ventures, in the 1920s Chagall also produced a number of smaller
collections of engravings, many single plates, and an impressive
quantity of coloured lithographs and monotypes.
During the 1920s and early ’30s, Chagall painted fewer large
canvases, and his work became more obviously poetical and
popular with the general public. Examples are Bride and Groom
with Eiffel Tower (1928) and The Circus (1931). With Hitler’s rise
to power, however, and the growing threat of a new world conflict,
the artist began to have visions of a very different sort, which are
reflected in the powerful White Crucifixion (1938). In this
painting, Jewish and Christian symbols are conflated in a
depiction of German Jews terrorized by a Nazi mob; the crucified
Christ at the center of the composition is wrapped in a tallith, a
Jewish prayer shawl.

Throughout this interwar period Chagall traveled extensively,

working in Brittany in 1924, in southern France in 1926, in
Palestine in 1931 (as preparation for the Bible etchings), and,
between 1932 and 1937, in Holland, Spain, Poland, and Italy. In
1931 his autobiography, My Life, was published. His reputation as
a modern master was confirmed by a large retrospective exhibition
in 1933 at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland.

Marc Chagall
QUICK FACTS
 View Media Page
BORN

July 7, 1887
Vitsyebsk, Belarus
DIED

March 28, 1985 (aged 97)

Saint-Paul, France

MOVEMENT / STYLE

 The Beehive

Late career of Marc Chagall

With the outbreak of World War II, Chagall moved to the Loire
district of France and then, as the Nazi menace for all European
Jews became increasingly real, further and further south. Finally,
in July 1941, he and his family took refuge in the United States; he
spent most of the next few years in and around New York City. For
a while Chagall continued to develop themes he had already
treated in France; typical works of this period are the Yellow
Crucifixion (1943) and The Feathers and the Flowers (1943). But
in 1944 his wife Bella died, and memories of her, often in
a Vitebsk setting, became a recurring pictorial motif. She appears
as a weeping wife and a phantom bride in Around Her (1945) and,
again, as the bride in The Wedding Candles (1945)
and Nocturne (1947).
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall, photograph by Arnold Newman, 1956.

© Arnold Newman

In 1945 Chagall designed the backdrops and costumes for a New

York production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird. He was
honoured with a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York in 1946 and at the Art Institute of
Chicago a few months later.

In 1948 Chagall settled again in France, first in the suburbs of

Paris and finally on the French Riviera at Vence and nearby Saint-
Paul. Between 1953 and 1956, without forgetting his native
Vitebsk, he produced a series of paintings inspired by his affection
for Paris.

Chagall was prolific for the last 30 years of his life, continuing to

paint on canvas while completing many large public projects in
other media. He mastered the difficult art of stained glass in the
late 1950s, and he designed a number of windows at international
locations such as the Cathedral of Metz in France (1958–60), the
synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center
in Jerusalem (1960–61), the United Nations building in New York
(1964), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1977). His stained-glass
windows are often considered to be some of the strongest work of
his late career; the medium’s capacity for brilliant colour was
perfectly suited to his magical imagery.

Chagall also remained involved in theatre design, completing a

number of projects for the Paris Opéra and the New York
Metropolitan Opera, including his highly regarded set and
costume designs for the 1967 production of Mozart’s The Magic
Flute. In 1973 the Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message
was dedicated at Nice, France, and in 1977 France honoured him
with a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in Paris.

Legacy

Chagall’s repertory of images, including massive

bouquets, melancholy clowns, flying lovers, fantastic animals,
biblical prophets, and fiddlers on roofs, helped to make him one of
the most popular major innovators of the 20th-century School of
Paris. He presented dreamlike subject matter in rich colours and
in a fluent, painterly style that—while reflecting an awareness of
artistic movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and even
abstraction—remained invariably personal. Although critics
sometimes complained of facile sentiments, uneven quality, and
an excessive repetition of motifs in the artist’s large total output,
there is agreement that at its best it reached a level of
visual metaphor seldom attempted in modern art.

Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall.