Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall as photographed in 1941 by Carl Van Vechten
Born	Moishe Shagal
Nationality	Belarusian-Jewish
Education	St. Petersburg Society of Art Supporters, Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting
Known for	Painting

Marc Chagall (Yiddish: מאַרק שאַגאַל‎; Russian: Марк Захарович Шага́л Mark Zakharovich Shagal; Belarusian: Мойша Захаравіч Шагалаў Mojša Zaharavič Šagałaŭ) (7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Belarusian-French painter of Belarusian-Jewish origin who was born in Belarus, at that time part of the Russian Empire. He is associated with the modern movements after impressionism.

Art

Chagall took inspiration from Belarusian folk-life, and portrayed many Biblical themes that reflected his Jewish heritage. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chagall engaged in a series of large-scale projects involving public spaces and important civic and religious buildings.

Chagall's artworks are difficult to categorize. Working in the pre-World War I Paris art world, he was involved with avant-garde currents, however, his work was consistently on the fringes of popular art movements and emerging trends, including Cubism and Fauvism, among others. He was closely associated with the Paris School and its exponents, including Amedeo Modigliani.

Abounding with references to his childhood, Chagall's work has also been criticized for slighting some of the turmoil which he experienced. He communicates happiness and optimism to those who view his work strictly in terms of his use of highly vivid colors. Chagall often posed himself, sometimes together with his wife, as an observer of a colored world like that seen through a stained-glass window. Some see The White Crucifixion, which is rich with intriguing detail, as a denunciation of the Stalin regime, the Nazi Holocaust, and the oppression of Jews in general.

For more information about his art, see the list of Chagall's artwork.

Use of symbolism

• Cow: life par excellence: milk, meat, leather, horn, power.
• Tree: another life symbol.
• Cock: fertility, often painted together with lovers.
• Bosom (often naked): eroticism and fertility of life (Chagall loved and respected women).
• Fiddler: in Chagall's town Vitebsk the fiddler made music at crosspoints of life (birth, wedding, death).
• Herring (often also painted as a flying fish): commemorates Chagall's father working in a fish factory.
• Pendulum Clock: time, and modest life (in the time of prosecution at the Loire River the pendulum seems being driven with force into the wooden box of the pendulum clock).
• Candlestick: two candles symbolize the Shabbat or the Menorah (candlestick with seven candles) or the Hanukkah-candlestick, and therefore the life of pious Jews (Chassidim).
• Windows: Chagall's Love of Freedom, and Paris through the window.
• Houses of Vitebsk (often in paintings of his time in Paris): feelings for his homeland.
• Scenes of the Circus: Harmony of Man and Animal, which induces Creativity in Man.
• Crucifixion of Jesus: an unusual subject for a Jewish painter, and likely a response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the late 1930s.
• Horses: Freedom.
• The Eiffel Tower: Up in the sky, freedom.

Exhibitions

Bella with white collar, 1917

Chagall's work is housed in a variety of locations, including the Palais Garnier (the old opera house), the Chase Tower Plaza of downtown Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, the cathedral of Metz, France, Notre-Dame de Reims, the Fraumünster abbey in Zürich, Switzerland, the Church of St. Stephan in Mainz, Germany and the delightful Biblical Message museum in Nice, France, that Chagall helped to design.

The only church with a complete set of Chagall window-glass is located in the tiny village of Tudeley, in Kent, England. Chagall painted 12 colorful stained-glass windows in Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, with each frame depicting a different tribe.

At the Lincoln Center in New York City, Chagall's huge mosaic murals are installed in the lobby of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966. Also in New York, the United Nations Headquarters has a stained glass wall of his work. In 1967 the UN commemorated this artwork with a postage stamp and souvenir sheet.

In 1973, the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall (Chagall Museum) opened in Nice, France. The museum in Vitebsk which bears his name was founded in 1997, in the building where his family lived on 29 Pokrovskaia street, although, prior to his death, years before the fall of the Soviet Bloc, Chagall was persona non grata in his homeland. The museum only has copies of his work.

Tributes

Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez released in 1978 one of his most widely known songs, Óleo de mujer con sombrero (Oil of woman with hat) in tribute to Chagall's work.

Jon Anderson, singer from the popular group Yes, met Chagall in the town of Opio, France as a young musician. Jon credits him as a seminal inspiration. He has recorded a piece of music in his honor, as well as the charitable Opio Foundation which he established in memory of his connection with the artist. In 1997, Pasqualina Azzarello painted A Celebration of Imagination: a Tribute to Marc Chagall, a 15'x30' public mural in Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 2005, musician Tori Amos recorded and released the composition "Garlands," with lyrics inspired by a series of Chagall lithographs.

In 2006, the musical group The Weepies released their album Say I Am You. One of the tracks is titled "Painting by Chagall"; part of the chorus is: "...we float like two lovers in a painting by Chagall, all around is sky and blue town, holding these flowers for a wedding gown, we live so high above the ground..." "Do Jump!", a physical theatre based in Portland, Oregon, created an acrobatic/trapeze theatre performance in tribute to Chagall.

Quotations

Marc Chagall stained-glass window at the U.N. in New York City.

File:Pasqualina Azzarello tribute to Marc Chagall.jpg

Pasqualina Azzarello's tribute mural

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

• "Great art picks up where nature ends."

• "I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension."

• "I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment."

• "If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste."

• "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."

• "My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent."

• "Will God or someone give me the power to breathe my sigh into my canvases, the sigh of prayer and sadness, the prayer of salvation, of rebirth?"

• "Will there be anymore!"

• "We all know that a good person can be a bad artist. But no one will ever be a genuine artist unless he is a great human being and thus also a good one."

• "Only love interest me, and I am only in contact with things I love."

Books

File:Pasqualina Azzarello mural detail.jpg

Mural dedication

• Nikolaj Aaron, Marc Chagall., (rororo-Monographie) Reinbek 2003 (In German)
• Benjamin Harshav, ed. Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003
• Aleksandr Kamensky, Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia, Trilistnik, Moscow, 2005 (In Russian)
• Aleksandr Kamensky, Chagall: The Russian Years 1907-1922., Rizzoli, NY, 1988 (Abridged version of Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia)
• Jonathan Wilson, Marc Chagall, Schocken, 2007
• Bill Wyman shoots Chagall (Genesis Publications, 1998)

External links

• Official site of Marc Chagall Museum in Vitebsk, Belarus
• Official site of Marc Chagall Museum in Nice, France
• Essays about Marc Chagall by Igor Schestkow
• Marc Chagall at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
• Chagall's collection at the Engel Gallery
• Marc Chagall at Olga's Gallery
• Pictures of: Me and My Village, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, and Chagall's illustrations to the Bible: Song of Songs III (1960), Jacob's Dream (1954-67), Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (1954-67), and Abraham and the Three Angels (1954-67)
• Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater, 1919-1949 at The Jewish Museum, Nov. 2008- March 2009