Marc Chagall

"Chagall" redirects here. For other uses, see Chagall (disambiguation).

Marc Chagall
Chagall, c. 1920
Born
Moishe Shagal

(1887-07-06)6 July 1887 (N.S.)
Liozna, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire (now Belarus)[1]
Died28 March 1985(1985-03-28) (aged 97)
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France
NationalityBelarusian, later French[2]
Known for
Notable workSee list of artworks by Marc Chagall
Movement
Spouses
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1915; died 1944)​
  • Valentina (Vava) Brodsky
    ​
    ​
    (m. 1952)​
    [3]
Children2[4]

Marc Chagall[a] (born Moishe Shagal; 6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985[b]) was a Belarusian, Russian and French artist.[c] An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

Chagall was born in 1887, into a Jewish family near Vitebsk, today in Belarus, but at that time in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During that period, he created his own mixture and style of modern art, based on his ideas of Eastern European and Jewish folklore. He spent the wartime years in his native Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College. He later worked in and near Moscow in difficult conditions during hard times in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, before leaving again for Paris in 1923. During World War II, he escaped occupied France to the United States, where he lived in New York City for seven years before returning to France in 1948.

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 pre-eminent Jewish artist".[15] Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz as well as the Fraumünster in Zürich, windows for the UN and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. 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."[16] "When Matisse dies", Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is".[17]

  1. ^ Harshav, Benjamin. "Chagall, Marc". The Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Retrieved 16 June 2023.
  2. ^ a b Harshav, Benjamin. "Marc Chagall and his times: a documentary narrative". Contraversions: Jews and Other Differences (1st ed.). Stanford University Press. August 2003. ISBN 0804742146.
  3. ^ Polonsky, Gill, Chagall. Phaidon, 1998. p. 25
  4. ^ Haggard-Leirens, Virginia (1987). Sieben Jahre der Fülle Leben mit Chagall (in German). Zürich: Diana. ISBN 3-905414-48-1. OCLC 26998475.
  5. ^ "Chagall, Marc". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press.[dead link]
  6. ^ "Chagall". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. Retrieved 27 July 2019.
  7. ^ "Chagall". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 27 July 2019.
  8. ^ Ehrenburg, Ilya (1990). Люди, годы, жизнь: Воспоминания [People, Years, Life: Memories] (in Russian). Vol. 1. Moscow: Soviet Writers. p. 184.
  9. ^ "Chagall, in Soviet, Weeps On Seeing His Early Art". The New York Times. 6 June 1973. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
  10. ^ "Biography of Marc Chagall". Musée Marc Chagall. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
  11. ^ "Marc Chagall". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 19 July 2023.
  12. ^ "Век Шагала" [Century of Chagall]. Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center (in Russian). Archived from the original on 3 October 2023. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
  13. ^ Malinovskaya, Anna (2016). "Гордость трех государств: документальное наследие Марка Шагала в России, Белоруссии и Франции" [Pride of three states: documentary heritage of Marc Chagall in Russia, Belarus and France]. CyberLeninka. 4 (6): 90–101.
  14. ^ Bruk, Yakov; Khmelnitskaya, Lyudmila (2022). Русская книга о Марке Шагале [Russian Book on Marc Chagall] (in Russian). Vol. 1. Litres. p. 746. ISBN 9785043515773.
  15. ^ McAloon, Jonathan (28 June 2018). "Marc Chagall's Jewish Identity Was Crucial to His Best Work". Artsy. Retrieved 12 March 2021.
  16. ^ Lewis, Michael J. "Whatever Happened to Marc Chagall?" Commentary, October 2008 pp. 36–37
  17. ^ Wullschlager, Jackie. Chagall: A Biography. Knopf, 2008


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