Marc Zaharovich Chagall (ʃəˈɡɑːl shə-gahl;[1] [nb 1]) (6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian artist[2] associated with several major artistic styles and one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He was an early modernist, and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists. For decades, he had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.

Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avante-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's golden age in Paris, where he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism. Yet throughout these phases of his style he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk.[3] When Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.[4]

Marc Chagall, born Moishe Segal, was born in a Lithuanian Jewish family in Liozna,[5] near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887.[note][6] At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000, with half the population being Jewish.[3] A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called Russian Toledo, after a cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire. As the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II.

Chagall was the youngest of six children.[citation needed] The family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family.[7] His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month. Chagall would later include fish motifs out of respect for his father, writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Chagall wrote of these early years Day after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. Why try to hide it How tell about it No word will ever ease my father's lot... There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands.[8]

One of the main sources of income of the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia. They also made furniture and various agricultural tools.[9] From the late 18th century to the First World War, the Russian government confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia, almost exactly corresponding to the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth recently taken over by Imperial Russia. This caused the creation of Jewish market-villages (shtetls) throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, schools, hospitals, and other community institutions.[10]14

Most of what is known about Chagall's early life has come from his autobiography, My Life. In it, he described the major influence that the culture of Hasidic Judaism had on his life as an artist. Vitebsk itself had been a center of that culture dating from the 1730s with its teachings derived from the Kabbalah. Goodman describes the links and sources of his art to his early home .Chagall's art can be understood as the response to a situation that has long marked the history of Russian Jews. Though they were cultural innovators who made important contributions to the broader society, Jews were considered outsiders in a frequently hostile society... Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life; his parents were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction in a life defined by their faith and organized by prayer.[10]14

Chagall formed a relationship with Sholom Dovber Schneerson, and later with Menachem M. Schneerson.[11]

Art education

Portrait of Chagall by Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, his first art teacher in Vitebsk
In Russia at that time, Jewish children were not allowed to attend regular Russian schools or universities. Their movement within the city was also restricted. Chagall therefore received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible. At the age of 13, his mother tried to enroll him in a Russian high school, and he recalled, But in that school, they don't take Jews. Without a moment's hesitation, my courageous mother walks up to a professor. She offered the headmaster 50 roubles to let him attend, which he accepted.[8]

A turning point of his artistic life came when he first noticed a fellow student drawing. Baal-Teshuva writes that for the young Chagall, watching someone draw was like a vision, a revelation in black and white. Chagall would later say that there was no art of any kind in his family's home and the concept was totally alien to him. When Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied, Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it. He soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.[9]

He eventually confided to his mother, I want to be a painter, although she could not yet understand his sudden interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that seemed so impractical, writes Goodman. The young Chagall explained, There's a place in town; if I'm admitted and if I complete the course, I'll come out a regular artist. I'd be so happy! It was 1906, and he had noticed the studio of Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a realist artist who also operated a small drawing school in Vitebsk, which included the future artists El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine. Due to Chagall's youth and lack of income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. However, after a few months at the school, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires.[9]

Artistic inspirations

Marc Chagall, 1912, Calvary (Golgotha), oil on canvas, 174.6 x 192.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Alternative titles Kreuzigung Bild 2 Christus gewidmet [Golgotha. Crucifixion. Dedicated to Christ]. Sold through Galerie Der Sturm (Herwarth Walden), Berlin to Bernhard Koehler (1849–1927), Berlin, 1913. Exhibited Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon, Berlin, 1913

Goodman notes that during this period in Russia, Jews had two basic alternatives for joining the art world One was to hide or deny one's Jewish roots. The other alternative—the one that Chagall chose—was to cherish and publicly express one's Jewish roots by integrating them into his art. For Chagall, this was also his means of self-assertion and an expression of principle.[10]14

Chagall biographer Franz Meyer, explains that with the connections between his art and early life the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment for his art.[12] Lewis adds, As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers... [with] scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms... [3]

Years later, at the age of 57 while living in America, Chagall confirmed this when he published an open letter entitled, To My City Vitebsk
Why Why did I leave you many years ago ... You thought, the boy seeks something, seeks such a special subtlety, that color descending like stars from the sky and landing, bright and transparent, like snow on our roofs. Where did he get it How would it come to a boy like him I don't know why he couldn't find it with us, in the city—in his homeland. Maybe the boy is crazy, but crazy for the sake of art. ...You thought I can see, I am etched in the boy's heart, but he is still 'flying,' he is still striving to take off, he has 'wind' in his head. ... I did not live with you, but I didn't have one single painting that didn't breathe with your spirit and reflection.[13]91

Art career

Russia (1906–1910)
In 1906, he moved to St. Petersburg which was then the capital of Russia and the center of the country's artistic life with its famous art schools. Since Jews were not permitted into the city without an internal passport, he managed to get a temporary passport from a friend. He enrolled in a prestigious art school and studied there for two years.[9] By 1907, he had begun painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes.

Between 1908 to 1910, Chagall was a student of Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. While in St. Petersburg, he discovered experimental theater and the work of such artists as Paul Gauguin.[14] Bakst, also Jewish, was a designer of decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and costumes for the 'Ballets Russes,' and helped Chagall by acting as a role model for Jewish success. Bakst moved to Paris a year later. Art historian Raymond Cogniat writes that after living and studying art on his own for four years, Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art. ...His apprenticeship over, Russia had played a memorable initial role in his life.[15]30

Chagall stayed in St. Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met Bella Rosenfeld. In My Life, Chagall described his first meeting her Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me.[9]22

France (1910–1914)

Marc Chagall, 1911, I and the Village, oil on canvas, 192.1 x 151.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York  ,In 1910, Chagall relocated to Paris to develop his artistic style. Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form, and French art was still dominated by the materialistic outlook of the 19th century.

But Chagall arrived from Russia with a ripe color gift, a fresh, unashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense of humor, he adds. These notions were alien to Paris at that time, and as a result, his first recognition came not from other painters but from poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire.[16]7 Art historian Jean Leymarie observes that Chagall began thinking of art as emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring, which was the reverse of the Cubist way of creating.[17]

He therefore developed friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde luminaries such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. Baal-Teshuva writes that Chagall's dream of Paris, the city of light and above all, of freedom, had come true.[9]33 His first days were a hardship for the 23-year-old Chagall, who was lonely in the big city and unable to speak French. Some days he felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he painted, about the riches of Russian folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and especially Bella.

Marc Chagall, 1912, The Fiddler, from which the musical, Fiddler on the Roof, takes its name.

In Paris, he enrolled at Académie de La Palette, an avant-garde school of art where the painters Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier taught, and also found work at another academy. He would spend his free hours visiting galleries and salons, especially the Louvre, where he would study the works of Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and others. It was in Paris that he learned the technique of gouache, which he used to paint Belarusian scenes. He also visited Montmartre and the Latin Quarter and was happy just breathing Parisian air.[9] Baal-Teshuva describes this new phase in Chagall's artistic development Chagall was exhilarated, intoxicated, as he strolled through the streets and along the banks of the Seine. Everything about the French capital excited him the shops, the smell of fresh bread in the morning, the markets with their fresh fruit and vegetables, the wide boulevards, the cafés and restaurants, and above all the Eiffel Tower. Another completely new world that opened up for him was the kaleidoscope of colours and forms in the works of French artists. Chagall enthusiastically reviewed their many different tendencies, having to rethink his position as an artist and decide what creative avenue he wanted to pursue.[9]33

During his time in Paris, Chagall was constantly reminded of his home in Vitebsk, as Paris was also home to many painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigrés from the Russian Empire. However, night after night he painted until dawn, only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of the big city at night.[9]44 My homeland exists only in my soul, he once said.[17]viii He continued painting Jewish motifs and subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, although he included Parisian scenes—- the Eiffel Tower in particular, along with portraits. Many of his works were updated versions of paintings he had made in Russia, transposed into Fauvist or Cubist keys.[3]

Marc Chagall, 1912, Still-life (Nature morte), oil on canvas, private collection
Chagall developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs ghostly figures floating in the sky, ... the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down.[3] The majority of his scenes of life in Vitebsk were painted while living in Paris, and in a sense they were dreams, notes Lewis. Their undertone of yearning and loss, with a detached and abstract appearance, caused Apollinaire to be struck by this quality, calling them surnaturel! His animalhuman hybrids and airborne phantoms would later become a formative influence on Surrealism.[3] Chagall, however, did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself. But Sweeney notes that others often still associate his work with illogical and fantastic painting, especially when he uses curious representational juxtapositions.[16]10

Sweeney writes that This is Chagall's contribution to contemporary art the reawakening of a poetry of representation, avoiding factual illustration on the one hand, and non-figurative abstractions on the other. André Breton said that with him alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting.[16]7

Russia and Soviet Belarus (1914–1922)
Because he missed his fiancée, Bella, who was still in Vitebsk—He thought about her day and night, writes Baal-Teshuva—and was afraid of losing her, Chagall decided to accept an invitation from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention being to continue on to Belarus, marry Bella, and then return with her to Paris. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited. The exhibit, held at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery was a huge success, The German critics positively sang his praises.[9]

People's Art School where the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art was situated
After the exhibit, he continued on to Vitebsk, where he planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella. However, after a few weeks, the First World War began, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period. A year later he married Bella Rosenfeld and they had their first child, Ida. Before the marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support her. Becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration. According to Lewis, [T]he euphoric paintings of this time, which show the young couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk—its wooden buildings faceted in the Delaunay manner—are the most lighthearted of his career.[3] His wedding pictures were also a subject he would return to in later years as he thought about this period of his life.[9]75

The October Revolution of 1917 was a dangerous time for Chagall although it also offered opportunity. By then he was one of the Russia's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special privileges and prestige as the aesthetic arm of the revolution.[3] He was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the country[clarification needed], but preferred something less political, and instead accepted a job as commissar of arts for Vitebsk. This resulted in his founding the Vitebsk Arts College which, adds Lewis, became the most distinguished school of art in the Soviet Union.

It obtained for its faculty some of the most important artists in the country, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. He also added his first teacher, Yehuda Pen. Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective of independently minded artists, each with their own unique style. However, this would soon prove to be difficult as a few of the key faculty members preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles, and disapproved of Chagall's attempt at creating bourgeois individualism. Chagall then resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow.

Bella with White Collar, 1917
In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow, first exhibiting his works at a well-known salon and in 1916 exhibiting pictures in St. Petersburg. He again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists. This exposure brought recognition, and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. Chagall was 30 years old and had begun to become well known.[9]77

In Moscow he was offered a job as stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to begin operation in early 1921 with a number of plays by Sholem Aleichem. For its opening he created a number of large background murals using techniques he learned from Bakst, his early teacher. One of the main murals was 9 feet (2.7 m) tall by 24 feet (7.3 m) long and included images of various lively subjects such as dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. One critic at the time called it Hebrew jazz in paint. Chagall created it as a storehouse of symbols and devices, notes Lewis.[3] The murals constituted a landmark in the history of the theatre, and were forerunners of his later large-scale works, including murals for the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera.[9]87

Famine spread after the war ended in 1918. The Chagalls found it necessary to move to a smaller, less expensive, town near Moscow, although he now had to commute to Moscow daily using crowded trains. In Moscow he found a job teaching art to war orphans. After spending the years between 1921 and 1922 living in primitive conditions, he decided to go back to France so that he could develop his art in a more comfortable country. Numerous other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to relocate to the West. He applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography, My Life.[9]121

France (1923–1941)
In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to France. On his way he stopped in Berlin to recover the many pictures he had left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the war began, but was unable to find or recover any of them. Nonetheless, after returning to Paris he again rediscovered the free expansion and fulfilment which were so essential to him, writes Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings.[3]