Chagall, Marc
ACHIEVEMENTS: One of the most significant artists of the 20th century.
DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: July 7, 1887, Vitebsk, Russia.
DATE/PLACE OF DEATH/AGE AT DEATH: March 28, 1985, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Age 97.
DISCIPLINE: Artist.
FIELD: Painting, printmaking, stained glass.
LANGUAGE: Russian, French.
Marc Chagall, 1912, The Fiddler, an inspiration for the musical Fiddler on the Roof[17]
EDUCATION: Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, studied with Leon Bakst.
MAJOR WORKS: I and the Village (1911), The Birthday (1915), The Twelve Tribes of Israel (1960-62), The America Windows (1977).
LIFE AND TIMES:
Chagall spent his childhood in Vitebsk, Belarus, a bustling town with a predominantly Jewish population. His father earned a meager living packing herring barrels while his mother kept a small shop for extra income. The Chagall’s were Hasidic Jews and their religion forbade representation of the human figure, so Chagall had little exposure to art as a child.
He was inspired to draw when he saw a classmate copying an illustration from a magazine. When a friend who saw his sketches told him that he had real talent, Chagall decided to take lessons. His parents were reluctant to support his career choice, but a local artist named Jehuda Penn offered to teach him free.
Chagall studied with Penn for several months but soon tired of classical teaching methods. He moved to St. Petersburg in 1906 and enrolled at the Society for the Protection of the Arts, where he again found himself bored with copying Greek and Roman casts.
In 1908 he began studying with Leon Bakst, who was famous for his set and costume designs for the Ballet Russe. It was in Bakst’s studio that Chagall became aware of artists such as Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, and he began to dream of moving to Paris. The man who made the dream a reality was Maxim Vinaver, a lawyer and deputy in the Parliament. Vinaver took Chagall under his wing, even letting him use his office as a studio. He offered Chagall a stipend to study in Paris, which Chagall eagerly accepted.
He arrived in Paris in 1910 and became entranced by the city. He lived near Montparnasse in an artists’ colony called “La Ruche,” or “Beehive,” where his neighbors included Modigliani*. He also knew Leger*. Chagall was part of a community of foreign-born artists that became known as the School of Paris. He became friends with the poet Apollinaire*, who was a proponent of Cubism, but he resisted the Cubist influence.
Chagall was more interested in color than in geometry. The themes of his paintings came from his childhood in Vitebsk and were rendered in a fantastical, dreamlike fashion. I and the Village (1911) features a man with a green face gazing into the eyes of a cow. In the background are houses, a church, a dancing peasant woman and a man carrying a scythe. His Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912) shows him dreaming of Vitebsk while working at a canvas, trying to paint his memories. Chagall had his first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1914.
He intended to make an appearance at the opening before continuing on to Vitebsk, where he would marry his sweetheart, Bella Rosenberg, and return with her to Paris. After he and Bella were married, Chagall was surprised when the outbreak of World War I prevented him from leaving the country, and he was conscripted into the army. Bella’s brother, a director of the Office of War Economy, arranged for Chagall to work for him as a clerk.
This allowed him to paint, and his years in military service were some of his most productive as an artist. Bella was a frequent subject, as in The Birthday (1915), a portrait of the happy couple in which Chagall floats off the ground in a state of bliss. His work appeared in shows in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and by the time of the Revolution of 1917, Chagall had made his reputation as one of Russia’s premier avant-garde artists. He was appointed cultural commissar for the Vitebsk area. He opened an art school and museums and was in charge of art exhibitions.
Chagall approached the job with enthusiasm, but his art met with the disapproval of party bureaucrats. In 1920 he moved to Moscow and designed sets for the Jewish National Theater. Two years later he joined the exodus of Russian artists, musicians and writers to the West. He emigrated to Berlin, where he was introduced to the art of printmaking and began engraving plates to accompany his memoir My Life.
He then moved back to Paris, where he continued printmaking with commissions for Gogol’s Dead Souls and La Fontaine’s Fables. He had his first retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1922, soon followed by others in Brussels and New York. By the time of his exhibition in Basel, Switzerland in 1933, Chagall was hailed as a leading artist of the School of Paris.
His work took on a darker aspect in the 1930’s as he witnessed the persecution of the Jews in Germany and Poland, which he represented in his White Crucifixion (1939). Chagall was reluctant to leave France after the country fell to the Nazis, but when he was stripped of his French citizenship for being a Jew, he fled to the United States with Bella.
They settled in New York, where they associated with other expatriate artists such as Leger and Mondrian*. New York’s Ballet Theater commissioned Chagall to create sets and costumes for several ballets, including Stravinsky*’s Firebird (1945).
In 1944, Chagall lost Bella to a throat infection. In 1946 he had a retrospective exhibition in New York that moved on to Chicago and Paris. Chagall returned to France for the opening and then moved back permanently, settling in the south near Vence. He began aspiring to larger artistic expressions.
He painted murals for the Watergate Theater in London and collaborated with Charles Marq to create stained glass windows for Metz Cathedral. He designed twelve stained glass windows for the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, a ceiling for the Paris Opera, and murals for the façade of the Metropolitan Opera.
He remarried in 1952 and traveled widely in the years that followed, finding inspiration in the light and colors of Greece, Italy and the Middle East. Chagall dabbled in ceramics, sculpture, mosaics and tapestries, but became a master of stained glass. His windows grace the United Nations building, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Cathedral at Rheims.
ASSESSMENT: Though influenced by many of the artistic movements of his time (Cubism, Surrealism, Fauvism), Chagall developed and maintained a unique personal artistic style that he successfully translated into a wide variety of media. He is widely considered to be a 20th century master.
EXTRA CONNECTIONS: Chagall designed the sets and costumes for the Paris Opera’s production of Ravel*’s Daphnis et Chloe.
He worked with Massine*
He was commissioned by Malraux* to paint the Paris Opera.
ONELINER: Marc Chagall, a modern Old Master
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Alexander, Sidney, Marc Chagall: A Biography, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1978.
Marks, Claude, World Artists 1950-1980, H.W.Wilson, New York, 1984, p.147-151.
PARENTS: Father, Zachar, mother, Feiga-Ita.
SIBLINGS: 6 sisters, Aniuta, Zina, Lisa, Maria, Rosa, Maroussia, 1 brother, David.
SPOUSE: Bella Rosenberg Chagall, Valentine Brodsky Chagall.
CHILDREN: 1 daugher, Ida, 1 son, David.