Marc Chagall was born in 1887 to a poor Jewish family in Russia. He was the eldest of nine children. Chagall began to display his artistic talent while studying at a secular Russian school, and despite his father’s disapproval, in 1907 he began studying art with Leon Bakst in St. Petersburg. It was at this time that his distinct style that we recognize today began to emerge. As his paintings began to center on images from his childhood, the focus that would guide his artistic motivation for the rest of his life came to fruition.

In 1910, Chagall, moved to Paris for four years. It was during this period that he painted some of his most famous paintings of the Jewish village, and developed the features that became recognizable trademarks of his art. Strong and bright colors began to portray the world in a dreamlike state. Fantasy, nostalgia, and religion began to fuse together to create otherworldly images.

In 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin, exhibiting work dominated by Jewish images. During the war, he resided in Russia, and in 1917, endorsing the revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk and then director of the newly established Free Academy of Art. In 1922, Chagall left Russia, settling in France one year later. He lived there permanently except for the years 1941 - 1948 when, fleeing France during World War II, he resided in the United States. Chagall's horror over the Nazi rise to power is expressed in works depicting Jewish martyrs and refugees.

In addition to images of the Jewish world, Chagall's paintings are inspired by themes from the Bible. His fascination with the Bible culminated in a series of over 100 etchings illustrating the Bible, many of which incorporate elements from folklore and from religious life in Russia.

Israel, which Chagall first visited in 1931 for the opening of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, is likewise endowed with some of Chagall's work, most notably the twelve stained glass windows at Hadassah Hospital and wall decorations at the Knesset.

Chagall received many prizes and much recognition for his work. He was also one of very few artists to exhibit work at the Louvre in their lifetime.

Marc Chagall

1887–1985 Biography

Paris Through the Window (Paris par la fenêtre), 1913. Oil on canvas, 53 1/2 x 55 3/4 inches (135.8 x 141.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.438. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

After Marc Chagall moved to Paris from Russia in 1910, his paintings quickly came to reflect the latest avant-garde styles. In Paris Through the Window, Chagall’s debt to the Orphic Cubism of his colleague Robert Delaunay is clear in the semitransparent overlapping planes of vivid color in the sky above the city. The Eiffel Tower, which appears in the cityscape, was also a frequent subject in Delaunay’s work. For both artists it served as a metaphor for Paris and perhaps modernity itself. Chagall’s parachutist might also refer to contemporary experience, since the first successful jump occurred in 1912. Other motifs suggest the artist’s native Vitebsk. This painting is an enlarged version of a window view in a self-portrait painted one year earlier, in which the artist contrasted his birthplace with Paris. The Janus figure in Paris Through the Window has been read as the artist looking at once westward to his new home in France and eastward to Russia. Chagall, however, refused literal interpretations of his paintings, and it is perhaps best to think of them as lyrical evocations, similar to the allusive plastic poetry of the artist’s friends Blaise Cendrars (who named this canvas) and Guillaume Apollinaire.

Years after Chagall painted The Soldier Drinks he stated that it developed from his memory of tsarist soldiers who were billeted with families during the 1904–05 Russo-Japanese war. The enlisted man in the picture, with his right thumb pointing out the window and his left index finger pointing to the cup, is similar to the two-faced man in Paris Through the Window in that both figuratively mediate between dual worlds—interior versus exterior space, past and present, the imaginary and the real. In paintings

such as these it is clear that the artist preferred the life of the mind, memory, and magical Symbolism over realistic representation.

In Green Violinist Chagall evoked his homeland. The artist’s nostalgia for his own work was another impetus in creating this painting, which is based on earlier versions of the same subject. His cultural and religious legacy is illuminated by the figure of the violinist dancing in a rustic village. The Chabad Hasidim of Chagall’s childhood believed it possible to achieve communion with God through music and dance, and the fiddler was a vital presence in ceremonies and festivals

“Paris through the window”

MARC CHAGALL

1913 oil on canvas, 135.8- 141.4 cm. - New York, Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org)

Raised in a poor Jewish family in Russia, Marc Chagall moved to Paris in 1923, where he felt like a stranger, a foreigner “impressed by the light”, in his own words. Despite having exhibited at the “Salon des Independents” with the main artists of his era, Chagall always stayed faithful to his peculiar style, a style, according to his own words, “poetic without poetry, mystic without mysticism”. Perhaps due to this obstinacy, during his last years his oeuvre is quite irregular, but in his first years in Paris he painted masterpieces full of mystery, just as the work illustrated here. With its shining colours, strange figures and unusual composition, this painting by Marc Chagall talks us about a mysterious and indecipherable Paris in which nothing -or nobody- is really what they appear to be.

Art Review | 'Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle'

His First Brush With the City of Light

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: June 23, 2011

If you were an Eastern European artist in early-20th-century Paris, you were part of a close, intensely competitive network. Montparnasse was full of ramshackle studio buildings like La Ruche, or the beehive, a honeycomblike structure where the Russian-Jewish painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) struggled alongside Modigliani, Soutine and other expats. “In La Ruche, you died or came out famous,” Chagall is said to have remarked.

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris

“Half-Past Three (The Poet),” which depicts the Russian poet Mazin, was one of many works that Marc Chagall created shortly after he arrived in Paris as a young Russian artist in 1911.

‘Paris Through the Window’

“Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, tries to recapture some of this proximal magic. The show sounds very much like a reprise of last year’s “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris” — the crucial difference being that Chagall was no Picasso.

Like the Picasso exhibition, “Paris Through the Window” builds on the Philadephia Museum’s substantial collection of early Modern art. It includes a taste of Chagall at his best, as well as a smattering of Modiglianis and Soutines and a generous serving of influential if less beloved artists like Jean Metzinger, Jacques Lipchitz and Albert Gleizes. But it feels uninspired, more like a festival obligation (it was planned in conjunction with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts) than like a flash of curatorial inspiration.

And it does nothing to dispute the commonly held notion that Chagall remained a small-town artist at heart, the proverbial fiddler on the roof, even when he was rubbing shoulders with the Parisian avant-garde.

The show, organized by the museum’s curator of Modern art, Michael Taylor, gets off to a promising start. Early paintings by Chagall and his Cubist associates show us that he had the potential to become a much more exciting artist. Under the influence of Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, among others, he introduced fractured forms to his enchanted scenes of city life.

In Chagall’s “Self-Portrait With White Collar,” which hangs next to Metzinger’s marvelous “Tea Time (Woman With a Teaspoon,)” a faceted forehead and deep under-eye hollows amount to a tentative stab at Cubism. So does the prismatic sky of “Paris Through the Window,” though the painting’s mythic creatures (among them a parachutist, a Janus figure and a cat with a human face) overshadow its formal achievements.

Here too is “Half-Past Three (The Poet)” (1911), a highlight of the museum’s collection and undoubtedly one of the best paintings Chagall ever made. It shows the Russian writer Mazin scribbling lines in a notebook and raising a coffee cup to his upside-down, green-tinged head. The painting’s broken diagonals hold Chagall’s sentimental tendencies in check, evoking the bleary-eyed sensations of the wee hours.

That upended head — a reference to a Yiddish idiom for madness or delirium, “fardreiter kop” — reappears in the later work “Oh God” (1919). Chagall painted it as he was being pushed out of the art school he had founded in his hometown, Vitebsk. He had quarreled with El Lissitsky and Kazimir Malevich, whose Constructivist curriculum had proved more popular with the students.

Chagall had been stuck in Russia since 1914, when he went home to visit family on the eve of World War I. In his small painting “The Smolensk Newspaper,” two seated men

bearing a more than casual resemblance to Cézanne’s “Card Players” react to the news of war breaking out.

It wasn’t all bad at home. Chagall found a wife, Bella Rosenfeld, who would appear in his well-known series of marriage portraits. (In the one that’s here, the mawkish “In the Night,” the couple is locked in an embrace on a snowy Vitebsk street.)

He also worked as a muralist, and as a costume and set designer in the Russian theater, using the connections of his old teacher, Leon Bakst, the principal artist of the Ballets Russes in Paris. The show devotes a rather large section to that dance company, with a paucity of Chagalls but an abundance of brilliantly folkloric studies by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.

Chagall made it back to Paris in 1923, where some major commissions from the powerful dealer Ambroise Vollard kept him busy illustrating new editions of Gogol’s “Dead Souls” and La Fontaine’s “Fables.” Sadly those works aren’t on view, though a couple of prints made around the same time (to accompany Chagall’s autobiography, “My Life”) are.

A reunion was under way in Montparnasse, where the old gang from La Ruche had been anointed as the “School of Paris.” But Chagall remained in shtetl mode, to judge from a curious painting of a woman and a pig bent over the same trough.

Works like this one make you wonder why “Paris Through the Window” has nothing much to say about Chagall’s Surrealist legacy. His dreamlike imagery — all those flying cows and floating villagers — was admired by the poets André Breton, Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. Within the Philadelphia Museum’s online collection, a search for “Surrealism” turns up seven works by Chagall, in addition to Miró, Dalí and de Chirico.

It’s also possible to celebrate Chagall the illustrator, set designer and muralist without making him out to be an arch-Modernist. (The Jewish Museum’s “Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater,” in 2008-9, did just that.) But “Paris Through the Window” does the opposite, overplaying Chagall’s avant-garde credentials at the expense of his artful storytelling.

“Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle” continues through July 10 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Benjamin Franklin Parkway at 26th Street, (215) 763-8100, philamuseum.org.

Russian painter Marc Chagall was one of the great masters of the School of Paris. He was also praised as an influence on surrealism, a twentieth-century artistic movement that expressed the subconscious in wild imagery.

An inspired childhood

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia, to a poor Jewish family that included ten children. His father, Zakhar Chagall, worked in a fish factory and his mother, Ida Chagall, worked in the family home and ran a grocery store. The years of his childhood, the family circle, and his native village became the main themes of his art. These first impressions lingered in his mind like original images and were transformed into paintings with such titles as the Candlestick with the Burning Lights, the Cow and Fish Playing the Violin, the Man Meditating on the Scriptures, the Fiddler on the Roof, and I and My Village. According to French poet and critic André Breton (1896–1966), with Chagall "the metaphor [comparison of images] made its triumphant return into modern painting." And it has been said that Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) was a triumph of the mind, but Chagall was the glory of the heart.

Chagall received early schooling from a teacher friend who lived nearby. He then attended the town school, but he only did well in geometry. He became an apprentice (a person who works for another in order to learn a profession) to a photographer but did not like the work. He then decided that he wanted to become an artist and talked his parents into paying for art lessons. He began his artistic instruction under the direction of a painter in Vitebsk. In 1907 he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he attended the school of the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts and studied briefly with famed Russian painter Leon Bakst (1866–1924). These were difficult years for Chagall. He was extremely poor and was unable to support himself with his artwork. He took a job as a servant and also learned how to paint signs. In Bakst's studio he had his first contact with the modern movement that was sweeping Paris, and it freed his inner resources. His pictures of this early period are pleasant images of his childhood.

With some help from a patron (someone who supported him financially), Chagall went to Paris in 1910. The poets Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961), Max Jacob (1876–1944), and Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), and the painters Roger de La Fresnaye (1885–1925), Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), and Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) became his friends. Chagall participated in the art showings at the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne in 1912, but it was his first one-man show in Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin, Germany, which established him internationally as a leading artist.

Quick Facts

• NAME: Marc Chagall • OCCUPATION: Illustrator, Painter • BIRTH DATE: July 07, 1887 • DEATH DATE: March 28, 1985 • PLACE OF BIRTH: Vitebsk, Belarus

Synopsis

Marc Chagall was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Belarus. He grew up in a poor Jewish family not far from the Polish frontier. He studied drawing in school and painting in St. Petersburg. In 1910, he moved to Paris and befriended a number of young paint

(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. He 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 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.

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

QUICK FACTSNAME: Marc Zaharovich ChagallOCCUPATION:Illustrator, PainterBIRTH DATE:July 07, 1887DEATH DATE:March 28, 1985EDUCATION: Imperial Society for the Protection of the ArtsPLACE OF BIRTH: Vitebsk, BelarusPLACE OF DEATH: Saint-Paul, FranceAKA: Marc ChagallORIGINALLY: Moishe Shagal

BEST KNOWN FOR

Marc Chagall was a French artist whose work was generally based on emotional association rather than traditional pictorial fundamentals.

Marc Chagall biographySYNOPSIS

Born in Belarus in 1887, Marc Chagall was a French painter, printmaker, and designer associated with several major artistic

styles, synthesizing elements of Cubism, Symbolism and Fauvism. One work in particular, I and the Village (1911), pre-dated

Surrealism as an artistic expression of psychic reality. An early modernist, Chagall created works in nearly every artistic

medium, including sets for plays and ballets, biblical etchings, and stained-glass windows. Chagall died in France in 1985.

Today, he is widely regarded as one of the most successful artists of the 20th century.

EARLY YEARS

Marc Chagall was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Belarus (in the Russian Empire), and was raised in a devoutly Jewish

environment with eight other siblings. His father worked in a fish warehouse, and his mother ran a shop where she sold fish

and sundry baking supplies. As a child, Chagall attended heder (Jewish elementary school) and later went to public school,

where lessons were taught in Russian.

After learning the elements of drawing at school, from 1907 to 1910, Chagall studied painting in St. Petersburg at the Imperial

Society for the Protection of the Arts, eventually under stage designer Léon Bakst. A characteristic work from this early period

is "The Dead Man" (1908), a painting that depicts a violinist (a recurring image for the artist) amid a nightmarish rooftop

scene.

Chagall moved to Paris in 1910, and then moved into a studio on the edge of town in a Bohemian area known as La Ruche

("the Beehive"). There, he met several writers and artists, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay and Albert

Gleizes. In such artistic company, experimentation was encouraged, and Chagall quickly began developing the poetic and

innovative tendencies that had begun to emerge in Russia at the time—tendencies that may not have previously been

encouraged. At the same time, he came under the influence of the Impressionist, Post-Impressionist and Fauvist pictures he

saw in Paris museums, and was introduced to Fauvism and Cubism. Before long, he was participating in the Salon des

Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne (1912), annual French exhibits, staging his first solo show in 1914 in Berlin to great

adulation.

This period—during which he created several images of his childhood and hometown of Vitebsk—is considered Chagall's

strongest, artistically, and the style he developed would remain with him for the rest of his life. His works during this time

include "Hommage Apollinaire" (1911-12), "The Fiddler" (1912) and "Paris Through the Window" (1913).

WORLD WAR I

After the Berlin exhibition, Chagall returned to Vitebsk, Belarus, where he intended to stay long enough to marry his fiancée, Bella. A few weeks later, though, he was stranded

by the outbreak of World War I, as the Russian borders were closed indefinitely. Instead of despairing, Chagall embraced local scenes in his art, working at the time in an

unusually realistic style.

Paintings such as "The Praying Jew" (or "The Rabbi of Vitebsk"; 1914) and "Jew in Green" (1914) emerged during this period.

Chagall married Bella in 1915, and the flying lovers of "Birthday" (1915-23) and the playful, acrobatic "Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine" (1917) serve as testaments to the

joyousness of the artist's spirit during the early years of his marriage.

At first, Chagall was enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution of October 1917, and he decided to settle in Vitebsk. In 1918, he was appointed commissar for art, and then

founded and directed the Vitebsk Popular Art School. Disagreements with the Suprematists (a group of artists primarily concerned with geometric shapes) resulted in Chagall's

resignation from the school in 1920, after which he moved to Moscow, there undertaking his first stage designs for the State Jewish Chamber Theater. Chagall then left Russia

for good. After a stop-over in Berlin in 1922, the artist returned to Paris in 1923 with his wife and daughter; his first retrospective took place there the following year, at the

Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert.

Chagall had learned engraving while in Berlin, and he received his first engraving commission in 1923, from Paris art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, for creating

etchings to illustrate a special edition of Nikolay Gogol's novel Dead Souls. Over the next three years, Chagall completed 107 plates for the Gogol book, 100 gouaches for poet

Jean de La Fontaine's Fables, and a series of etchings illustrating the Bible; his career as a printmaker was in full swing.

During the 1930s, besides painting and engraving, Chagall traveled extensively: to the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Italy and Palestine, where he stayed for two months, visiting

the Holy Land to inspire his Bible etchings. In Palestine in 1931, Chagall immersed himself in Jewish life and history, and by the time he returned to France, he had completed

32 of biblical plates (he would create 105 in total).

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WORLD WAR II

With Hitler rising to power, a full-blown war was waged in Germany against artists, and, subsequently, anything deemed modern or difficult to interpret being confiscated and

burned (with some of Chagall's works being singled out). The once-impressed German press now turned on Chagall, and in response, Chagall's paintings struck a different tone,

with terror and persecution taking on foreground roles. In "Solitude" (1933), Chagall's anxiety over the fate of humanity is represented by an atmosphere of despondency and in

the figure of the huddled, pious Jew; in "White Crucifixion" (1938), Jewish and Christian symbols are mixed in a depiction of a Nazi crowd terrorizing Jews. The artist would

be dealt another blow in 1939, when Ambroise Vollard died and Chagall's various etching projects were put on hiatus. (Another publisher later picked up where Vollard had left

off, issuing Dead Souls in 1948, La Fontaine's Fables in 1952 and the Bible in 1956.)

With the outbreak of World War II, Chagall moved farther and farther south in France, as the Nazi threat became increasingly real for European Jews.

A group of Americans ran a rescue operation trafficking artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the United States via forged visas, and Marc Chagall was one of more than

2,000 who escaped this way. He arrived in New York with Bella on June 23, 1941—the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union—and spent most of the next few years in

the New York area.

In New York, Chagall continued to develop his signature themes, but in 1942, a new commission came his way: to design the sets and costumes for a new ballet, Aleko, by

Léonide Massine, which would stage Pushkin's The Gypsies and be accompanied by the music of Tchaikovsky. When Aleko—Chagall's first ballet—premiered on September 8,

1942, it was a great success. Also during this period, Chagall designed the backdrops and costumes for Stravinsky's ballet The Firebird (1945), another success.

The course of Chagall's life and art was changed yet again in 1944, when his wife, Bella, passed away. Thereafter, depictions of memories of his wife recurred in Chagall's

work; she appears in several forms—a haunted weeping wife, an angel and a phantom bride—in "Around Her" (1945), and as a bride in "The Wedding Candles" (1945) and

"Nocturne" (1947).

Before moving back to France for good in 1948, Chagall was honored with retrospective exhibitions at both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of

Chicago.

LATER YEARS

In 1948, Chagall settled again in France, on the French Riviera at Vence. During the 1950s, he forayed into painting and modeling ceramics, stone sculptures and mosaics. In

1958, Chagall designed the scenery and costumes for the ballet Daphnis and Chloe for the Paris Opera, from whom, five years later, he received a commission to paint a new

ceiling for its theater. The choice of artist, however, stirred controversy, as some objected to having a French national monument redesigned by a Russian Jew, while others

disliked the idea of a modernist working on such a historic building. Nonetheless, the project went forward with Chagall at the helm, and when it was unveiled, it was a huge hit

with all factions, surprising many and vindicating others, Chagall included.

Over Chagall's decades-long career, his use of color captured the attention of viewers, and his varying projects in his later years were no different: In 1960, he began creating

stained-glass windows for the synagogue of Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem—a project that became a spiritual journey for Chagall, once again

linking him to his Jewish heritage. Chagall later took on more stained-glass projects, including at the United Nations building (1964); the Fraumünster Cathedral in Zurich

(1967); St. Stephen's Church in Mainz, Germany (1978); and the All Saints' Church in the United Kingdom (1978).

Marc Chagall died in Saint-Paul, France, on March 28, 1985, leaving behind a vast collection of work in several branches of the arts, as well as a rich legacy as a major Jewish

artist and a pioneer of modernism. Pablo Picasso famously once said of the artist, "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really

is."

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"My hands were too soft.. I had to find some special occupation, some kind of work that would not force me to turn away from the sky and the stars, that would allow me to discover the meaning of life."

SYNOPSISMarc Chagall's poetic, figurative style made him one of most popular modern artists, while his long life and varied output made him one of the most internationally recognized. While many of his peers pursued ambitious experiments that led often to abstraction, Chagall's distinction lies in his steady faith in the power of figurative art, one that he maintained despite absorbing ideas from Fauvism and Cubism. Born in Russia, Chagall moved to France in 1910 and became a prominent figure within the so-called Ecole de Paris. Later he spent time in the United States and the Middle East, travels which reaffirmed his self-image as an archetypal "wandering Jew."

KEY IDEASChagall flirted with many radical modernist styles at various points throughout his career, including Cubism, Suprematism and Surrealism, all of which possibly encouraged him to work in an entirely abstract style. Yet he rejected each of them in succession, remaining committed to figurative and narrative art, making him one of the modern period's most prominent exponents of the more traditional approach.

Chagall's Jewish identity was important to him throughout his life, and much of his work can be described as an attempt to reconcile old Jewish traditions with styles of modernist art. However, he also occasionally drew on Christian themes, which appealed to his taste for narrative and allegory.

In the 1920s, Chagall was claimed as a kindred spirit by the emerging Surrealists, and although he borrowed from them, he ultimately rejected their more conceptual subject matter. Nevertheless, a dream-like quality is characteristic of almost all of Chagall's work; as the poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire once said, Chagall's work is "supernatural."

MARC CHAGALL BIOGRAPHYChildhoodMarc Chagall was the eldest of nine children born to Khatskl Shagal and Feige-Ite in the settlement town of Liozna, near Vitebsk, an area that boasted a high concentration of Jews. Raised in a Hasidic family, Chagall attended local Jewish religious schools - obligatory for Russian Jews during this time, since discrimination policies prohibited mixing of different racial groups - where he studied Hebrew and the Old Testament. Such teachings would later inform much of the content and motifs in Chagall's paintings, etchings and stained-glass work.

During his school days, Chagall adopted the habit of drawing and copying images from books, which quickly developed into a love for art and the choice to pursue it as a career, a decision that did not please his parents. In 1906 Chagall began his tutelage with the famous Russian portrait artist Yehuda Pen, who operated an all-Jewish private school in Vitebsk for students of drawing and painting. Although grateful for the free formal instruction, Chagall left the school after several months.

That same year Chagall moved to St. Petersburg to continue his studies at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting where he briefly apprenticed under the artist and set designer Leon Bakst. Bakst, a devout Jew himself, is believed to have encouraged Chagall to introduce Jewish imagery and themes in his work, a practice that was unpopular at this time, especially given the Russian Empire's hostility towards Jews.

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Early Period and Training Chagall moved to Paris in 1910, just as Cubism was emerging as the leading avant-garde movement. At the impressionable age of 23 and speaking no French, Chagall aligned himself with Cubism and enrolled in classes at a small art academy. In early paintings like The Poet, or Half Past Three and I and the Village (both 1911), Chagall is clearly adopting the abstract forms and dynamic compositions that characterize much of Cubism, yet he came to reject the movement's more academic leanings, instead infusing his work with touches of humor, emotion and cheerful color.

While in Paris, Chagall kept close to his heart his home town of Vitebsk, often using subject matter from memory in his paintings. Subjects included pastoral village scenes, weddings, and fiddlers playing on rooftops. In many of the pictures, the figures seem to float freely in the sky, signatures of Chagall's lyrical and melancholic love of his far-away home.

Parisian scenes also found their way into Chagall's repertoire, with paintings like Les fiancüs de la Tour Eiffel and Paris Through the Window (both 1913), which recall the work of Henri Matisse, and Chagall's friend Robert Delaunay. Complementing these elements, his work contained near-supernatural qualities that are considered key precursors to Surrealism.

Mature period During one of his brief visits to Russia during this time, Chagall fell in love and became engaged to Bella Rosenfeld, who came to be the subject of many of his paintings, including Bella with White Collar (1917). In 1914, Chagall returned to Vitebsk via Berlin (where he enjoyed a well-received exhibition of some 200 works at the Sturm Gallery, all of which he would never recover), with plans to marry Bella and subsequently move back to Paris. The two did marry, but the outbreak of World War I that same year put a stop to their plan to return to Paris, and for the next nine years Chagall and his wife would remain in Russia.

Not long after the war's outbreak, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 occurred, an event that essentially obliged Chagall to remain in Russia and thrust him into the political post of Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk, a teaching position that conflicted with his nonpolitical nature. He exhibited some new paintings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but his overall work ethic and pace lessened due to the tense climate.

After years of scraping by in Vitebsk, Moscow and other towns, Chagall and Bella had saved enough to move back to Paris in 1923. At this point, Chagall's name had some cach�n modern art circles, affording him the opportunity to travel throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Notably, Chagall formed a friendship with dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned Chagall to draw and paint multiple religious scenes from the Old Testament and similar sources. In addition to Chagall's Jewish themed works, such as Green Violinist (1923-24) and Dancing Mirjam (1931), he often drew inspiration from the Christian Bible. He also travelled to Palestine and the Holy Lands in 1931. In addition to his many oil canvases and gouaches, such as the iconic White Crucifixion(1938), Chagall created some 100 etchings illustrating scenes from the Bible.

In the coming years, World War II crippled most of Europe and forced many of its greatest modern artists, both Jew and gentile, to seek refuge in the United States. Hitler's Third Reich reigned over a large portion of the continent, including Vichy France, where the Chagalls were then living, and it is said that Joseph Goebbels personally ordered the artist's paintings to be burned. In 1941, thanks to Chagall's daughter Ida, and the Museum of Modern Art's director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Chagall's name was added to a list of European artists whose lives were at risk and in need of asylum, and that June, Chagall and Bella arrived safely in New York City.

Late period Just before the war in Europe came to a close, Bella died from a virus infection, and it came to Chagall's attention that Vitebsk had been razed during the German invasion of Russia. Crippled with grief, Chagall's work lessened dramatically, yet he continued to take commissions for theatrical sets and costume designs (a medium for which Chagall received great praise at the time, but which has since garnered little posthumous attention).

Chagall never truly made New York his home, and in 1947 the widower returned to France and settled in the southern city of Vence. He was remarried in 1952, to Valentine 'Vava' Brodsky, and he continued to paint, but his later canvases are remarkably different than his better-known earlier works. His colors and subjects appear more melancholy, and his painterly touches became increasingly lyrical and abstract, almost reverting back in time to Post-Impressionist motifs. This led several mid- and late-century critics to label Chagall's later work "clumsy" and lacking in focus.

The crowning achievements of the last two decades of his life were a series of large-scale commissions. The first came in 1960, for stained-glass windows. These represented the twelve tribes of Israel, and were installed at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem. Similar commissions followed in both Europe and the U.S., including the memorial window Peace (1964) for the United Nations, and The America Windows (1977) for the Chicago Institute of Art, which Chagall considered tokens of gratitude for his brief asylum in the U.S. during World War II. Significant commissions for murals also helped define Chagall's late career, and included the ceiling of the Paris Opera House (1963) and the juxtaposed murals The Sources of Musicand The Triumphs of Music (1966) for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

In 1985 Chagall passed away at the age of 97, by now the last surviving of the original European masters of modern art. He was buried in Saint-Paul, in southeastern France.

LEGACY Marc Chagall's influence is as vast as the number of styles he assimilated to create his work. Although never completely aligning himself with any single movement, he interwove many of the visual elements of Cubism, Fauvism, Symbolismand Surrealism into his lyrically emotional aesthetic of Jewish folklore, dream-like pastorals, and Russian life. In this

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sense, Chagall's legacy reveals an artistic style that is both entirely his own and a rich amalgam of prevailing Modern art disciplines. Chagall is also, much like Picasso, a prime example of a modern artist who mastered multiple media, including painting in both oil and gouache, watercolor, murals, ceramics, etching, drawing, theater and costume design, and stained-glass work.

Original content written by Justin Wolf

MARC CHAGALL QUOTES "When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art."

"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."

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

"Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." - Pablo Picasso, ca. 1954, following the death of Henri Matisse

"Some become painters by controlling or deflecting their gifts - and even attain greatness - but Chagall was born into paint, into the canvas, into the picture, with his clumsiness and all." - Clement Greenberg, 1946

INFLUENCES

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ARTISTS FRIENDS MOVEMENTS

ARTISTS FRIENDS MOVEMENTS

ARTWORKS

Title: I and the Village (1911)Artwork Description & Analysis: This early work clearly shows both the Cubist and Fauvist influences at play in Chagall's canvas, yet unlike the works of Picasso or Matisse, Chagall is far more playful and liberal with decorative elements, creating a pastoral paradise out of the Russian countryside. It is an early sign of the approach that would make the artist famous and influential: a blend of the modern and the figurative, with a light, whimsical tone. Chagall depicts a fairy tale in which a cow dreams of a milk maid and a man and wife (one upright, one upside down) frolic in the work fields. Abstraction is at the heart of this work, but it exists to decorate the picture rather than invite analysis of the images.

Oil on canvas - Museum of Modern Art, New York

Title: Paris Through the Window (1913)Artwork Description & Analysis: Paris Through the Window appears to reflect upon Chagall's feeling of divided loyalties -his love both for modern Paris and for the older patterns of life back in Russia. Hence the figure in the bottom right looks both ways, and the couple below the Eiffel Tower seems to be split apart. Upon first glance, the picture may recall one of Robert Delaunay's many fractured portraits of the Eiffel Tower, rendered in a style often referred to as Orphic Cubism. But Chagall makes no attempt here to dissect the subject or view it from multiple angles. Instead he searches for beauty in the details,

Leon Bakst

Paul Gauguin

Pablo Picasso

Henri Matisse

Guillaume Apollinaire

Robert Delaunay

Fernard Léger

Ambroise Vollard

Expressionism

Cubism

Fauvism

Symbolism

Marc ChagallYears Worked: 1910 - 1985

Pablo Picasso

El Lissitzky

Ossip Zadkine

Diego Rivera

Joan Miró

André Breton

Henry McBride

Robert Hughes

Surrealism

Abstract Expressionism

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creating what writer Guillaume Apollinaire called "sur-naturalist" elements, such as a two-faced head and floating human figure. The end result is a brilliantly balanced and visually appealing snapshot of Paris, juxtaposing the imaginary and the real, all seen through eyes that are both eccentric and loving.

Oil on canvas - Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Title: Bella with White Collar (1917)Artwork Description & Analysis: This portrait of Chagall's first wife, Bella, whom he married in the summer of 1915, also doubles as a love letter of sorts. Her demure face and figure stand over a lush pastoral landscape, larger than life, and may have been inspired by the traditional subject, The Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Chagall once remarked that, "Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love." Bella with White Collar, while certainly expressive and vibrant, stands as a lasting example of Chagall's mastery of more traditional subjects and forms, yet he no less maintains the faintest of sur-naturalist elements throughout. At Bella's feet we can see two tiny figures which presumably represent Chagall and the couple's daughter, Ida.

Oil on canvas - Private collection

Title: Green Violinist (1923-24)Artwork Description & Analysis: Nostalgia for the artist's rustic village is at the heart of this painting. Fiddlers on rooftops were a popular motif of Chagall's, stemming from his memories of Vitebsk and the Russian countryside he called home as a child. This motif also reflects the artist's deep devotion to his Jewish cultural roots. In Green Violinist, his subject (who may represent the prophet Elijah) is an extension of the rooftops, indicated by the windows and geometric shapes in his pant legs; he is literally a colorful man, a pillar of the community, poised in rhythmic stance. Chagall also recalls with this painting the belief among the Chabad Hasidim in Vitebsk that music and dance represented a communion with God. Incidentally, the 1964 musical "Fiddler on the Roof" got its name from Chagall's paintings.

Oil on canvas - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Title: White Crucifixion (1938)Artwork Description & Analysis: Although Chagall became well known for his religious and Biblical motifs, the blatant Christian symbolism present in White Crucifixion and other works (particularly his stained-glass windows for several churches) is surprising given Chagall's devout Orthodox Jewish background. However, this work is a clear indication of Chagall's faith and his response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe at this time; here Jesus's suffering parallels that of his people. Jesus wears a Jewish prayer shawl, and whilst he suffers on the cross, Jewish figures on all sides of him suffer as well, fleeing from marauding invaders who burn a synagogue. The painting rather poignantly inverts the notion that the crucifixion is purely a Christian symbol - indeed that might only serve as a reminder of what divides Jews from Christians. Instead it makes the Crucifixion into a sign of their common suffering.

Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago

Title: Peace (1964)Artwork Description & Analysis: Following the sudden death of the UN's secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, killed in a plane crash in 1961, the Staff of the United Nations set up a Committee and a Foundation to provide a "living memorial" to Hammarskjold and all those who died in the cause of world peace. The committee invited Chagall to contribute a piece of his work, and it was soon decided that the monument would be a free-standing piece of stained glass. The breadth and detail of the window is staggering, comprised of free-floating figures and faith-based symbols throughout, co-existing blissfully in a heaven-meets-earth setting. Chagall considered this window, today referred to as the "Chagall Window," not just a memorial to one man, but a thank-you card of sorts to the country that granted him asylum during his time of need in World War II.

Stained glass window - United Nations Building, New York

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