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Marc Chagall (Yiddish: מאַרק שאַגאַל; Russian: Марк Заха́рович Шага́л; 7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Russian–French artist, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. He created a unique career in virtually every artistic medium, including paintings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall's haunting, exuberant, and poetic images have enjoyed universal appeal, with art critic Robert Hughes referring to him as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century." As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of
the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over
the course of a long career created some of the best-known paintings of
our time. 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 United Nations, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including the ceiling for the Paris Opéra. His most vital work was made on the eve of World War I, when he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his visions of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent his wartime years in Russia, becoming one 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
was known to have 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." "When Matisse dies", Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is." Marc Chagall, born Moishe Shagal, was born in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was around 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo", after the former cultural center of the Spanish Empire.
As the city was mostly built of wood, little of it survived three years
of Nazi occupation and destruction during World War II. Chagall was the eldest of nine children in a Jewish Levitic family
led by his father Khatskl (Zakhar) Shagal, employed by a herring
merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, who sold groceries from their
home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only
20 roubles a 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: During the previous decades, the Jewish population of the town survived numerous government organized attacks (pogroms),
prejudice, segregation, and discrimination. As a result, they created
their own schools, synagogues, hospitals, a cemetery, and other
community institutions. One of their key sources of income was from the
manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia. They also made
furniture and various agricultural tools. Art
historian and curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman writes that for religious
and economic reasons from the late 1700s to the First World War, Russia
confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included sections of modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltic States. This caused the natural creation of Jewish market villages (shtetls) throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, culture, and religious observances. Most of what is known about Chagall's early life has come from his autobiograhy, 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: A
turning point in 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 how there was no art of any kind in his
family's home and the concept was totally foreign 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.
He
eventually confided to his mother, "I want to be a painter", although
she could not 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 ran a small drawing school in Vitebsk, which included future luminaries as 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. 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", by moving away from any public expressions of
Jewishness, in order to avoid the discrimination endemic in Russian
society. 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." 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." 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 . . . " 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": 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. By 1907 he had begun painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes. During 1908 to 1910, Chagall studied under 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. 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. Chagall stayed in St. Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met and fell in love with 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."
In
1910 Chagall moved to Paris to develop his own 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 foreign 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. 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. 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." His
first days were a hardship for the 23 year old Chagall, who found
himself alone 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.
In Paris he enrolled at La Palette, an art academy where the painters 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 Russian scenes. He also visited Montmartre and the Latin Quarter, "and was happy just breathing Parisian air." Baal-Teshuva describes this new phase in Chagall's artistic development: 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. During
his time in Paris Chagall was constantly reminded of his home in
Russia, as Paris was also home to many Russian painters, writers,
poets, composers, dancers, and other émigre′s. 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. "My homeland exists only in my soul", he once said. 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. Chagall
developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs: the ghostly figure
floating in the sky, . . . the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature
dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny
offspring sleeping upside down. 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 "animal/human hybrids and airborne phantoms" would later become a
formative influence on Surrealism. 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." 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."
Because
he missed not being with his fiancée, Bella, who was still in
Vitebsk, "He thought about her day and night", writes Baal-Teshuva, and
was afraid of losing her. He therefore decided to accept an invitation
from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention
being to continue on to Russia, 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." 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 broke out, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period. A
year later he married Bella Rosenfeld and 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. Hence, despite the ongoing war, Chagall's spirits
remained high, mostly due to his marriage. 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." His wedding pictures were also a subject he would return to in later years as he thought about this period of his life.
The October Revolution of 1917 was
a dangerous time for Chagall although it also offered opportunity. By
then he was one of the Soviet Union'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." He
was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the
country, but preferred something with a lower profile, and instead took
a position 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 or 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 looked down on Chagall's attempt at
creating "bourgeois individualism" in their teachings. Chagall then
resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow. 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 constant exposure caused his name to spread
and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began
illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. Chagall had
turned 30 and had begun to make a name for himself. In
Moscow he was offered a position as stage designer for the newly formed
State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to open 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 key
murals was 9 feet tall by 24 feet 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. 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. Life
quickly became a hardship for Russians as 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 move back to France so
that his art could grow in an atmosphere of greater freedom. Numerous
other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to move to the
West. He applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain
approval, wrote his autobiography, My Life. 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. He formed a business relationship with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. This inspired him to begin creating etchings for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's Dead Souls, the Bible, and the Fables of La Fontaine. These illustrations would eventually come to represent his finest printmaking efforts. By
1926 he had his first exhibition in the United States at the Reinhardt
gallery of New York which included about 100 works, although he did not
travel to the opening. He instead stayed in France, "painting
ceaselessly", notes Baal-Teshuva. It
was not until 1927 that Chagall made his name in the French art world,
when art critic and historian Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his
book Modern French Painters. However, Raynal was still at a loss to accurately describe Chagall to his readers: During this period he traveled throughout France and fell in love with Côte d'Azur, where he enjoyed the landscapes, colorful vegetation, the blue Mediterranean,
and the mild weather. He made repeated trips to the countryside, always
taking his sketchbook. His wife Bella had a special role in his life.
Wullschlager notes that "she was the living connection to Russia that
allowed him to evolve as an artist in exile, in contrast to most
Russian artistic emigrés, whose work withered once they left
their homeland." He also visited nearby countries and later wrote about the impressions some of those travels left on him: After returning to Paris from one of his trips, Vollard commissioned him to illustrate the Old Testament version
of the Bible. Although he could have completed the project in France,
he used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Palestine to
experience for himself the Holy Land.
He arrived there in February 1931 and ended up staying for two months.
Chagall felt at home in Palestine where many spoke Yiddish and Russian.
According to Baal-Teshuva, "he was impressed by the pioneering spirit
of the people in the kibbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and
the other holy places." Chagall
later told a friend that Palestine gave him "the most vivid impression
he had ever received." Wullschlager notes, however, that whereas
Delacroix and Matisse had found inspiration in the exoticism of North
Africa, he as a Jew in Palestine had different perspective. "What he
was really searching for there was not external stimulus but an inner
authorization from the land of his ancestors, to plunge into his work
on the Bible illustrations." Chagall
stated that "In the East I found the Bible and part of my own being."
As
a result, he immersed himself in "the history of the Jews, their
trials, prophecies, and disasters", notes Wullschlager. She adds that
taking on the assignment was an "extraordinary risk" for Chagall, as he
had finally made his name in the art world as a leading contemporary
painter, but would now pull away from modernist themes and delve into
"an ancient past." Between 1931 and 1934 he worked "obsessively" on "The Bible", even going to Amsterdam in order to carefully study the biblical paintings by Rembrandt and El Greco,
to see the extremes in religious painting. He walked the streets of the
city's Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere. He told
Franz Meyer: Chagall saw the Old Testament as
a "human story, . . . not with the creation of the cosmos but with the
creation of man, and his figures of angels are rhymed or combined with
human ones", writes Wullschlager. She points out that in one of his
early Bible images, "Abraham and the Three Angels", the angels sit and
chat over a glass of wine "as if they have just dropped by for dinner." He
returned to France and by the following year had completed 32 out of
the total of 105 plates. By 1939, at the outbreak of World War II, he
had finished 66. However, Vollard died that same year. When the series
was completed in 1956, it was published by Edition Tériade.
Baal-Teshuva writes that "the illustrations were stunning and met with
great acclaim." Once again Chagall had shown himself to be one of the
20th century's most important graphic artists." Leymarie has described these drawings by Chagall as "monumental": Not long after Chagall began his work on the Bible, Adolf Hitler came to power in Berlin. Anti-Semitic laws were being introduced and the first concentration camp at Dachau had opened. Wullschlager describes the early affects on the art world: Beginning in 1937 around twenty thousand works from German museums were confiscated as "degenerate" by a committee headed by Joseph Goebbels." Although
the German press had once "swooned over him", the new German leadership
now made a mockery of Chagall's art, describing them as "green, purple,
and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying
through the air . . . representing [an] assault on Western
civilization.". After Germany invaded and occupied France, the Chagalls naively remained in Vichy France, unaware that French Jews, with the help of the Vichy government,
were being collected and sent to German concentration camps, from which
nearly all would never return. The Vichy collaborationist government,
led by Marshal Philippe Pétain,
immediately upon assuming power set up a commission to "redefine French
citizenship" with the aim of stripping "undesirables", including
naturalized citizens, of their French nationality. Chagall had been so
involved in his art, that it was not until October 1940, after the
Vichy government, at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, began
passing anti-Semitic laws, that he began to understand the significance
what was happening around him. Hearing that Jews were being removed
from public and academic positions, the Chagalls finally "woke up to
the danger they faced." But Wullschlager notes that "by then they were
trapped." Their
only refuge could be America, but "they could not afford the passage to
New York" or the large bond that each immigrant had to provide upon
entry to ensure that they would not become a financial burden to the
country. According
to Wullschlager, "[T]he speed with which France collapsed astonished
everyone: the French army, with British support, capitulated even more
quickly than Poland had done" a year earlier, even though Poland had
been attacked by both Germany and Russia. "Shock waves crossed the
Atlantic... as Paris had until then been equated with civilization
throughout the non-Nazi world." Yet the attachment of the Chagalls to France "blinded them to the urgency of the situation." Nor were they alone in their slow reaction to the coming Holocaust,
to be aided by France's collaboration, as many other well-known Russian
and Jewish artists eventually sought to escape: these included Chaim Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Fulda, author Victor Serge and prize winning author Vladimir Nabokov, who although not Jewish himself, took a "passionate interest" in Jews and Israel. Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people temporarily living in Marseilles who were waiting to emigrate to America: After prodding by their daughter Ida, who "perceived the need to act fast," and with help from Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art,
Chagall was saved by having his name added to the list of prominent
artists, whose lives were at risk, that the United States should try to
extricate. He left France in May 1941, "when it was almost too late",
adds Lewis. Picasso and Matisse were
also among artists invited to come to America but they decided to
remain in France. Chagall and Bella arrived in New York on June 23,
1941, which was the next day after Germany invaded Russia. Even before arriving in America in 1941, Chagall was awarded the Carnegie Prize in
1939. After being in America he discovered that he had already achieved
"international stature", writes Cogniat. He felt ill-suited in this new
role in a foreign country, however, one whose language he could not yet
speak. He became a public figure mostly against his will, feeling lost
in the strange surroundings.
What
compounded his discomfort in America was his knowing that he left
France under Nazi occupation and that the fate of millions of other
Jews was at risk. After a while he began to settle down in New York
which was full of writers, painters, and composers who, like himself,
had fled from Europe during the Nazi invasions. He spent time visiting
galleries and museums, and befriended other painters including Piet Mondrian and André Breton. Baal-Teshuva writes that Chagall "loved" going to the sections of New York where Jews lived, especially the Lower East Side.
There he felt at home, enjoying the Jewish foods and being able to read
the Yiddish press, which became his main source of information since he
did not yet speak English. Contemporary
artists did not yet understand or even like Chagall's art. According to
Baal-Teshuva, "they had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for
mysticism." The Paris School, which was referred to as 'Parisian Surrealism,' meant little to them. Those attitudes would begin to change, however, when Pierre Matisse, the son of recognized French artist Henri Matisse,
became his representative and held Chagall exhibitions in New York and
Chicago in 1941. One of the earliest exhibitions included 21 of his
masterpieces from 1910 to 1941. Art critic Henry McBride wrote about this exhibit for the New York Sun: He was offered a commission by choreographer Leonid Massine, of the New York Ballet Theatre to design the sets and costumes for his new ballet, Aleko. This ballet would stage the words of Pushkin's verse narrative The Gypsies with the music of Rachmaninoff.
While Chagall had done stage settings before while in Russia, this was
his first ballet, and it would give him the opportunity to visit Mexico. While there he quickly began to appreciate the "primitive ways and
colorful art of the Mexicans," notes Cogniat. He found "something very
closely related to his own nature", and did all the color detail for
the sets while there. Eventually,
he created four large backdrops and had Mexican seamstresses sew the
ballet costumes. When the ballet premiered on September 8, 1942 it was
considered a "remarkable success." In the audience were other famous mural painters who came to see Chagall's work, including Diego Rivera and José Orozco.
According to Baal-Teshuva, when the final bar of music ended, "there
was a tumultuous applause and 19 curtain calls, with Chagall himself
being called back onto the stage again and again." The ballet also
opened in New York City four weeks later at the Metropolitan Opera and the response was repeated, "again Chagall was the hero of the evening." Art critic Edwin Denby wrote of the opening for the New York Herald Tribune that Chagall's work: After
Chagall returned to New York in 1943, however, current events began to
take on more importance for him, and this was reflected in his art,
where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. He heard that the Germans had destroyed the town where he was raised, Vitebsk, and became greatly distressed. He heard about the concentration camps and learned more about the occupation of France. By 1944, months before the Allies attempted to liberate France,
he was coming to grips with the reality and significance of the war in
Europe and on its Jewish populations. During a speech in February 1944,
he described some of his feelings: In the same speech he credited his homeland of Russia with doing the most to save the Jews: On
September 2, 1944, Bella died suddenly due to a virus infection, which
was not treated due to the wartime shortage of medicine. As a result,
he stopped all work for many months, and when he did resume painting
his first pictures were concerned with preserving Bella's memory. Wullschlager writes of the effect on Chagall: "As news poured in through 1945 of the ongoing Holocaust at Nazi concentration camps,
Bella took her place in Chagall's mind with the millions of Jewish
victims." He even considered the possibility that their "exile from
Europe had sapped her will to live." After
a year of living with his daughter, Ida, and her husband Michel Gordey,
he entered into a romance with Virginia Haggard, great-niece of the
author Henry Rider Haggard; their relationship lasted seven years. They had a child together, David McNeil, born 22 June 1946, Haggard recalled her 'seven years of plenty' with Chagall in her book, My Life with Chagall (Robert Hale, 1986). A
few months after France succeeded in liberating Paris from Nazi
occupation, with the help of the Allied armies, Chagall published a
letter in a Paris weekly, "To the Paris Artists": By 1946 his artwork was becoming more widely recognized. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held
a large exhibition with 40 years of his work which gave visitors one of
the first complete impressions of the changing nature of his art over
the years. The war had by then ended and he began making plans to
return to Paris. According to Cogniat, "He found he was even more
deeply attached than before, not only to the atmosphere of Paris, but
to the city itself, to its houses and its views." Chagall summed up his years living in America: He went back for good in the autumn of 1947, where he attended the opening of the exhibition of his works at the Musée National d'Art Moderne. After returning to France he traveled throughout Europe and chose to live in the Côte d'Azur which by that time had become somewhat of an "artistic centre." Matisse lived above Nice, while Picasso lived in Vallauris.
Although they lived nearby and sometimes worked together, there was
artistic rivalry between them as their work was so distinctly
different, and they never became long-term friends. According to
Picasso's mistress, Françoise Gilot, Picasso still had a great deal of respect for Chagall, and once told her, In
April 1952, Virginia Haggard left Chagall for the photographer Charles
Leirens; she went on to become a professional photographer herself. Chagall's
daughter Ida married art historian Franz Meyer in January 1952, and
feeling that her father missed the companionship of a woman in his
home, introduced him to Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a
similar Russian Jewish background, who had run a successful millinery
business in London. She became his secretary, and after a few months
agreed to stay only if Chagall married her. The marriage took place in
July, 1952 -
though six years later, when there was conflict between Ida and Vava,
'Marc and Vava divorced and immediately remarried under an agreement
more favourable to Vava'. In
the years ahead he was able to produce not just paintings and graphic
art, but also numerous sculptures and ceramics, including wall tiles,
painted vases, plates and jugs. He also began working in larger scale
formats, producing large murals, stained glass windows, mosaics and
tapestries. In
1963 Chagall was commissioned to paint the new ceiling for the Paris
Opera, a majestic 19th-century building and national monument. André Malraux,
France's Minister of Culture wanted something unique and decided
Chagall would be the ideal artist. However, this choice of artist led
to controversy: some objected to having a Russian Jew decorate a French
national monument; others took exception to the ceiling of the historic
building being painted by a modern artist. Some magazines wrote
condescending articles about Chagall and Malraux, about which Chagall
commented to one writer: Nonetheless,
Chagall remained on the project which took the 77-year-old Chagall a
year to complete. The final canvas was nearly 2,400 square feet (220
sq. meters) and required 440 pounds of paint. It had five sections
which were glued to polyester panels and hoisted up to the 70-foot
ceiling. The images Chagall painted on the canvas paid tribute to the
composers Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel, as well as to famous actors and dancers. It
was presented to the public on September 23, 1964 in the presence of
Malraux and 2,100 invited guests. The Paris correspondent for the New York Times wrote, "For once the best seats were in the uppermost circle." Baal-Teshuva writes: After
the new ceiling was unveiled, "even the bitterest opponents of the
commission seemed to fall silent", writes Baal-Teshuva. "Unanimously,
the press declared Chagall's new work to be a great contribution to
French culture." Chagall did not disappoint the trust that Malraux had
placed in him, with Malraux later saying, "What other living artist
could have painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera in the way Chagall
did?.... He is above all one of the great colourists of our time...
many of his canvases and the Opera ceiling represent sublime images
that rank among the finest poetry of our time, just as Titian produced the finest poetry of his day." In Chagall's speech to the audience he explained the meaning of the work: According
to Cogniat, in all Chagall's work during all stages of his life, it was
his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention. In his
earlier years his range was limited by his emphasis on form and his
pictures never gave the impression of painted drawings. He adds, "The
colors are a living, integral part of the picture and are never
passively flat, or banal like an afterthought. They sculpt and animate
the volume of the shapes... they indulge in flights of fancy and
invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones....
His colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest
movements, planes and rhythms." He
was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors.
Cogniat writes, "Chagall is unrivalled in this ability to give a vivid
impression of explosive movement with the simplest use of colors...."
Throughout his life his colors created a "vibrant atmosphere" which was
based on "his own personal vision." Chagall's
early life left him with a "powerful visual memory and a pictorial
intelligence", writes Goodman. After living in France and experiencing
the atmosphere of artistic freedom, his "vision soared and he created a
new reality, one that drew on both his inner and outer worlds." But it
was the images and memories of his early years in Russia that would
sustain his art for more than seventy years. According
to Cogniat, there are certain elements in his art that have remained
permanent and seen throughout his career. One of those was his choice
of subjects and the way they were portrayed. "The most obviously
constant element is his gift for happiness and his instinctive
compassion, which even in the most serious subjects prevents him from
dramatization...." Musicians
have been a constant during all stages of his work. After he first got
married, "lovers have sought each other, embraced, caressed, floated
through the air, met in wreaths of flowers, stretched, and swooped like
the melodious passage of their vivid day-dreams. Acrobats contort
themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the end of their stems;
flowers and foliage abound everywhere." Wullschlager explains the sources for these images: Chagall described his love of circus people: His
early pictures were often of the town where he was born and raised,
Vitebsk. Cogniat notes that they are realistic and give the impression
of firsthand experience by capturing a moment in time with action,
often with a dramatic image. In his later years, as for instance in the
"Bible series", subjects were put on a loftier plane. He managed to
blend the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color
the pictures were always at least acceptable if not powerful. He never
attempted to present pure reality but always created his atmospheres
through fantasy. In
all cases Chagall's "most persistent subject is life itself, in its
simplicity or its hidden complexity.... He presents for our study
places, people, and objects from his own life. After absorbing the techniques of Fauvism and Cubism, he was able to blend them with his own folkish style. He gave the grim life of Hasidic Jews the "romantic overtones of a charmed world", notes Goodman. It was by combining the aspects of Modernism with
his "unique artistic language", that he was able to catch the attention
of critics and collectors throughout Europe. Generally, it was his
boyhood of living in a Russian provincial town that gave him a
continual source of imaginative stimuli. Chagall would become one of
many Jewish émigrés who later became noted artists, all
of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most numerous and
creative minorities", notes Goodman. World War I, which ended in 1918, had displaced nearly a million Jews and destroyed what remained of the provincial shtetl culture that had defined life for most Eastern European Jews for
centuries. Goodman notes, "The fading of traditional Jewish society
left artists like Chagall with powerful memories that could no longer
be fed by a tangible reality. Instead, that culture became an emotional
and intellectual source that existed solely in memory and the
imagination.... So rich had the experience been, it sustained him for
the rest of his life." Sweeney
adds that "if you ask Chagall to explain his paintings, he would reply,
'I don't understand them at all. They are not literature. They are only
pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me...." In
1948, after returning to France from the U.S. after the war, he saw for
himself the destruction that the war had brought to Europe and the
Jewish populations. Some of his art would thereafter reflect his
visions and sadness. In 1951, as part of a memorial book dedicated to
eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France, he
wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950", which
inspired paintings such as the "Song of David": Lewis
writes that Chagall "remains the most important visual artist to have
borne witness to the world of East European Jewry... and inadvertently
became the public witness of a now vanished civilization." Although
Judaism has religious inhibitions about pictorial art of many religious
subjects, Chagall managed to use his fantasy images as a form of visual
metaphor combined with folk imagery. His "Fiddler on the Roof", for
example, combines a folksy village setting with a fiddler as a way to
show the Jewish love of music as important to the Jewish spirit. Art historian Franz Meyer points out that one of the main reasons for the unconventional nature of his work is related to the hassidic movement which inspired the world of his childhood and youth and had actually
impressed itself on most Eastern European Jews since the eighteenth
century. He writes, "For Chagall this is one of the deepest sources,
not of inspiration, but of a certain spiritual attitude... the hassidic
spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment of his art." However, Chagall had a complex relationship with Judaism. On the one hand, he credited his Russian Jewish cultural background as
being crucial to his artistic imagination. But however ambivalent he
was about his religion, he could not avoid drawing upon his Jewish past
for artistic material. As an adult, he was not a practicing Jew, but
through his paintings and stained glass, he continually tried to
suggest a more "universal message", using both Jewish and Christian
themes. The
windows symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel who were blessed by Jacob
and Moses in the verses which conclude Genesis and Deuteronomy. In
those books, notes Leymarie, "The dying Moses repeated Jacob's solemn
act and, in a somewhat different order, also blessed the twelve tribes
of Israel who were about to enter the land of Canaan.... In the
synagogue, where the windows are distributed in the same way, the
tribes form a symbolic guard of honor around the tabernacle." Leymarie describes the physical and spiritual significance of the windows: At the dedication ceremony in 1962, Chagall described his feelings about the windows: For
me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart
and the heart of the world. Stained glass has to be serious and
passionate. It is something elevating and exhilarating. It has to live
through the perception of light. To read the Bible is to perceive a
certain light, and the window has to make this obvious through its
simplicity and grace.... The thoughts have nested in me for many years,
since the time when my feet walked on the Holy Land, when I prepared
myself to create engravings of the Bible. They strengthened me and
encouraged me to bring my modest gift to the Jewish people — that people
that lived here thousands of years ago, among the other Semitic peoples. Chagall
first worked on stage designs in 1914 while living in Russia. It was
during this period in the Russian theatre that formerly static ideas of
stage design were, according to Cogniat, "being swept away in favor of
a wholly arbitrary sense of space with different dimensions, perspectives, colors and rhythms." These
changes appealed to Chagall who had been experimenting with Cubism and
wanted a way to enliven his images. Designing murals and stage designs,
Chagall's "dreams sprang to life and became an actual movement." As
a result, Chagall played an important role in Russian artistic life
during that time and "was one of the most important forces in the
current urge towards anti-realism" which helped the new Russia invent
"astonishing" creations. Many of his designs were done for the Jewish
Theatre in Moscow which put on numerous Jewish plays by playwrights
such as Gogol and Singe. Chagall's set designs helped create illusory atmospheres which became the essence of the theatrical performances. After
leaving Russia, twenty years passed before he was again offered a
chance to design theatre sets. In the years between, his paintings
still included harlequins, clowns and acrobats, which Cogniat notes
"convey his sentimental attachment to and nostalgia for the theatre." His
first assignment designing sets after Russia was for the ballet "Aleko"
in 1942, while living in America. In 1945 he was also commissioned to
design the sets and costumes for Stravinsky's "The Firebird." These designs contributed greatly towards his enhanced reputation in America as a leading artist. Cogniat
describes how Chagall's designs "immerse the spectator in a luminous,
colored fairy-land where forms are mistily defined and the spaces
themselves seem animated with whirlwinds or explosions." His technique of using theatrical color in this way reached its peak when Chagall returned to Paris and designed the sets for Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloë" in 1958. In 1964 he repainted the ceiling of the Paris Opera using 2,400 square feet of canvas, and in 1966 he painted two monumental murals for the outside of the Metropolitan Opera in
New York. The pieces were titled "the Sources of Music" and "The
Triumph of Music", which he completed in France and shipped to New York.
Chagall also designed tapestries which were woven under the direction of Yvette Cauquil-Prince, who also collaborated with Picasso. These tapestries are much rarer than his paintings, with only 40 of them ever reaching the commercial market. Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12 floor mosaics and a wall mosaic. Chagall began learning about ceramics and sculpture while living in south France. Ceramics became a fashion in the Côte d'Azur with various workshops starting up at Antibes, Vence and Vallauris. He took classes along with other known artists including Picasso and Fernand Léger.
At first Chagall painted existing pieces of pottery but soon expanded
into designing his own, which began his work as a sculptor as a
compliment to his painting. After
experimenting with pottery and dishes he moved into large ceramic
murals. However, he was never satisfied with the limits imposed by the
square tile segments which Cogniat notes "imposed on him a discipline
which prevented the creation of a plastic image." Author
Serena Davies writes that "By the time he died in France in 1985 – the
last surviving master of European modernism, outliving Joan Miró
by two years – he had experienced at first hand the high hopes and
crushing disappointments of the Russian revolution, and had witnessed
the end of the Pale, the near annihilation of European Jewry, and the
obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a population
of 240,000 survived the Second World War."
He
came from nowhere to achieve worldwide acclaim. Yet his fractured
relationship with his Jewish identity was "unresolved and tragic",
Davies states. He would have died with no Jewish rites, had not a
Jewish stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer
for the dead, over his coffin." |