Marc Chagall

Russian-born French artist

• Born: July 7, 1887
• Birthplace: Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus)
• Died: March 28, 1985
• Place of death: Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France

Chagall was a master of several artistic media, including stained glass, printmaking, mosaic, stage design, mural, ceramic, and tapestry, but he is best known for his paintings that depict the fantastical states of dreams and memories. The distinctive Chagallian appearance of an artistic work portrays a world of vibrantly colored figures in incongruous juxtaposition and magical abrogation of natural law, he kind of vision that many people experience in their sleep.

Early Life

Marc Chagall (shah-gahl) was born in a Russian village with a substantial Jewish population in what became Belarus. His family was active in the mystical Jewish sect called Hasidism. The quality of Chagall’s childhood may be gauged by the presence of the huts of Vitebsk in almost all of his paintings, testifying to pleasant memories of his youth, a characteristic that sets Chagall apart from many twentieth century artists. This is especially surprising because Chagall grew up in a period when Russian life regularly was punctuated with brutal violence against Jews.

Young Marc received his early education from a synagogue cantor and then through a brief enrollment in a village school. He did not take well to school, so his parents apprenticed him to a photographer. That training did not suit him either. Painting attracted him, and he moved to St. Petersburg in 1907 to study in an art school. He did not do well as a student of art. Chagall explained the apparent futility of his varied experiences of learning as the result of the impossibility of his being taught anything. He said he could do only what was instinctive for him. Instinct led him to paint, and his work pleased one attorney well enough for him to buy two of Chagall’s works and to send him to Paris with a monthly stipend.

Life’s Work

In Paris, pictures flowed from Chagall’s brush in a veritable torrent. In the course of hundreds of paintings, he found his personally distinguishing characteristics of colors with airy brilliance and figures without apparent weight. From this five-year period come some of his most famous and representative works, including I and the Village (1911), Self Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912), The Fiddler (1912), and The Praying Jew , or Rabbi of Vitebsk (1914).

Despite regular exhibition of his works, Chagall failed to find a market for them. He returned to Russia in 1915, partly to escape his penurious existence in France and more so to persuade his childhood sweetheart, Bella Rosenfeld, to marry him. The couple married on July 25, 1915. Their happy and productive partnership lasted until her death in 1944. Chagall celebrated the romance of the early years of marriage with tenderly affectionate paintings such as Birthday, Double Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1917), and Over the Town (1917-1918). In the last one, for example, two figures in a lovers’ embrace float ecstatically above a cluster of Russian huts and fences surmounted by the Orthodox Church of Vitebsk.

Chagall served the czarist state from 1915 to 1917 as a clerk in an army office in the capital. He served the revolutionary Bolshevik state after the November revolution of 1917 with much more enthusiasm as commissar of the arts for his native Vitebsk province, assuming this post on September 12, 1918. There he worked diligently to establish a system of art education for young people. His dedication to providing art for the people and not merely for an elite was unqualified; he set aside his personal creative activity to perform his service to society. Yet he faced continued frustration from the unappreciative criticism of literalists who could not understand green cows and levitated horses.

Chagall recruited to his school the artistic genius Kasimir Malevich, whose employment backfired on him. The point of conflict between Chagall and Malevich was symptomatic of the tension that remained throughout his nearly seven decades of creative work, namely, the desirability of art’s representing objects. In 1919, Malevich carried the banner of suprematism, which abjured representational art to concentrate on pure shape and color independent of figures. Chagall had no hesitation about the inclusion of figures in art; for him complete artistic representation must add to the three-dimensional world of physical things a fourth dimension, the psychic. Chagall had no heart for battle over art style, and he left Vitebsk permanently in May, 1920. Chagall moved to Moscow, but he found the conditions there inhospitable to his artistic impulse. Moscow was receptive to two extremes in painting with which Chagall was not comfortable, either objectless art or strictly figurative reality. His topsy-turvy world of unfettered fantasy fit badly in the revolutionary state of workers and peasants. With the help of Commissar of Education Anatoly Lunacharsky, Chagall received permission to leave the Soviet Union. He did not return for fifty years.

Chagall settled in France, with his wife and daughter, to begin a seventeen-year stay during which his artistic fame slowly grew to grand proportions. Shortly after his arrival in Paris in 1923, he took up a new artistic medium, in which, like every one he tried, he soon produced a prodigious quantity of works. This new medium was printmaking for books. A Paris art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, commissioned etchings for an edition of the novel Myortvye dushi (1842, 1855; Dead Souls, 1887) by the nineteenth century Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. Working between 1923 and 1925, Chagall made 107 plates for this book. Then Vollard gave Chagall the major project of producing illustrations for an edition of the Bible, totaling 105 by the time the edition was finished in 1956. In his prints, Chagall was deprived of the vivid colors that radiate from his paintings, but these black-and-white engravings demonstrate his mastery of shape.

Chagall’s second stay in France was punctuated in 1931 with a trip to Palestine, where he saturated himself with the physical and human environments for his etchings for the Bible, and in 1932 with a trip to Holland, where he sought psychological affinity with Rembrandt. In 1935, he visited the Lithuanian town of Vilnius, in Poland, which was the nearest he returned to Vitebsk throughout his fifty years away from Russia.

Changes in the international climate cast a shadow over Chagall’s life as the 1930’s advanced. He expressed his fears for the world in the face of the rise of fascism in White Crucifixion (1938), in which a central crucified figure stretches across the canvas, encompassing a world of suffering and terror in which a synagogue burns and a boatload of fugitives barely escapes the threatening mob. Above the suffering figure, both the Hebrew and Christian (INRI) inscriptions are displayed in ecumenical communion: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” This painting does not speak a Christian message. The Christ figure suffers amid the tortures of humanity. He does not take on himself the evils of the world, as in Christian soteriology, but he is one victim alongside a multitude of other Jewish victims. The personal meaning of that tribulation transpired for Chagall in his flight from the anti-Semitic Nazi conquerors of France in July, 1941. He and his family sailed to New York, and he remained in North America, where Bella died in 1944, until 1948. In 1945, he produced remarkable stage sets for a major new production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet TheFirebird.

In 1948, Chagall returned to France, which became his home for the rest of his life. In 1952, he married Valentina “Vava” Brodsky. At sixty-five years of age he took up new media: ceramic sculpture, stained glass, and tapestry. Beginning in the late 1950’s, he produced a succession of amazing windows for the Cathedral of Metz (1958, 1963), the synagogue of the University Medical Center in Jerusalem (The Twelve Tribes of Israel, 1960-1961), the United Nations, a church in Tarrytown, New York (1964), the Fraumünster of Zurich (1970), and the Cathedral of Reims (1974). In 1977, in celebration of the American bicentennial and in memory of Mayor Richard Daley, he unveiled a set of windows, which was displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tapestries that Chagall designed on biblical themes were unveiled in the building of the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem in 1969.

In 1973, a museum containing his works alone was opened in Nice, France. In the same year, he was permitted to visit the Soviet Union. Although his reception was formally polite, it was chilled by the anti-Semitic atmosphere that prevailed. Chagall’s greatest disappointment was that paintings that he had left behind fifty years earlier were neither displayed in public nor released to his possession. Not until 1987 was the Soviet Union to grant him an exhibition on a grand scale in commemoration of the centenary of his birth. In his ninetieth year, 1977, the government of France bestowed on him the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Italy, too, honored him with the highest award it had to give. In the same year, sixty-two of his paintings were hung in the Louvre, an extremely rare event for a living artist. Chagall died at the home where he spent the postwar years, less than three years short of his hundredth birthday.

Significance

Chagall established himself as a leading artist of the twentieth century, displaying recognized talent and attracting a popular following. However, he was an artist who defies easy classification. Although his works show signs of cubism, expressionism, Symbolism, and even abstractionism, he does not stand out as a representative of any of these styles. Because his works depict the psychic dimension of reality, Chagall may be classified a Surrealist, but the buoyancy and joyfulness of his works set them apart from those of most representatives of that fashion. Chagall’s conviction was that the interior world of the human psyche is more real than the external world, and therefore to paint it is to paint realistically, not, as critics often suggest of his works, symbolically, fantastically, or surrealistically.

Although he was clearly an artist of the twentieth century, Chagall may be placed solidly within an artistic current flowing out of the Middle Ages. Vital artistic affinities to Chagall’s work are to be found in the Russian tradition of religious icons. With figures of the physical world, he portrayed the world of the spirit, and he made his canvases, like the wood of the icon, windows that opened onto that world. Religious themes permeate Chagall’s productions, but his affirmation that he personally was not religious can be taken at face value. He confined himself to the world of the human spirit, while the spirit of the divine apparently eluded him.

Bibliography

Alexander, Sidney. Marc Chagall: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1978. A warm and personal treatment of the life of Chagall that successfully incorporates the memoirs of Chagall, friends, and family members into a scholarly, but necessarily incomplete, account of his life. In keeping with the author’s focus, only two works by Chagall are reproduced, and these are in black-and-white.

Chagall, Marc. Chagall by Chagall. Edited by Charles Sorlier. Translated by John Shepley. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. A selection of almost three hundred works organized by subject matter and illuminated with text from Chagall’s My Life and other writings. This book, edited by Chagall’s assistant, Sorlier, updates Franz Meyer’s work. Includes a chronology and an annotated bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Jerusalem Window. Translated by Elaine Desautels. Text by Jean Leymarie. 2d ed. New York: George Braziller, 1975. Displays color reproductions of the twelve stained-glass windows that Chagall did for the synagogue of the medical center in Jerusalem. The book has a sparse text by art critic Leymarie that interprets the contents of these beautiful translations of Chagall’s painting style into stained glass.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. My Life. Translated by Elisabeth Abbott. London: Peter Owen, 1965. A translation of a charming book, written in Yiddish in the early 1920’s, in which Chagall narrates the first thirty-three years of his life.

Compton, Susann. Chagall. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985. Prepared for an American exhibition of Chagall’s work in the year of his death, this book gives a thorough introduction to his life and work by a historian who specializes in Russian art. Includes a helpful chronology, judicious bibliography, and more than one hundred color reproductions.

Greenfeld, Howard. The Essential Marc Chagall. New York: Wonderland Press/Harry N. Abrams, 2002. Describes how Jewish life and folklore influenced Chagall’s art.

Harshav, Benjamin. Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative. Translated by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. This comprehensive biography, more than one thousand pages long, documents Chagall’s life and the development of his art. It includes many letters and documents written by Chagall and his contemporaries that have been translated into English.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World: The Nature of Chagall’s Art and Iconography. New York: Rizzoli, 2006. A guide to the iconography contained in Chagall’s art work, much of which is derived from Jewish symbols and folklore.

Meyer, Franz. Marc Chagall. Translated by Robert Allen. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1964. Written by the husband of Chagall’s daughter, Ida, this book gives much helpful detail about Chagall’s works. Many of the reproductions are in excellent color. More than one hundred pages constitute a classified catalog, with black-and-white photographs, of works in the several media.

Wilson, Jonathan. Marc Chagall. New York: Nextbook-Schocken, 2007. A biography tracing Chagall’s life and development as an artist, synthesizing the work of many previous writers.