Marc Chagall
The painter of dreams and flying lovers.
Marc Chagall from Vitebsk painted memories of the Jewish village: flying couples, fiddlers and goats. He also made stained glass.
Marc Chagall was born in 1887 into a Jewish family in Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus. His father worked in a herring warehouse. He was apprenticed to the painter Yehuda Pen in his home town and then studied in St Petersburg. The world of his childhood, with its wooden houses, synagogues, cows, goats and musicians, became the source he drew on all his life.
Around 1910 he came to Paris and lived in the studio building La Ruche. There he encountered Cubism and the bright colours of French painting, but used them in his own way. I and the Village of 1911, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, combines a cow, a green profile and an upside-down village in a dreamlike pattern. He returned to Vitebsk in 1914 and in 1915 married Bella Rosenfeld. The couple floating in Birthday of 1915, also at MoMA, are the two of them.
After the revolution he ran an art school in Vitebsk but came into conflict with Kazimir Malevich. In Moscow he painted decorations for the Jewish theatre, and he left the Soviet Union in 1922. He settled in France, but in 1941 he fled the Nazis to the United States. Bella died there in 1944, a grief that marked his painting for a long time. White Crucifixion of 1938, with a Jewish Christ surrounded by persecution, is in the Art Institute of Chicago.
After the war he lived in the south of France and worked in many techniques: printmaking, ceramics, mosaic and above all stained glass. He made windows for the synagogue at the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem, for Reims Cathedral and for the United Nations building in New York. He also painted the ceiling of the Paris Opéra in 1964 and two large murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Chagall died in 1985 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, aged 97. He never fully belonged to any movement. The Surrealists wanted to claim him as a forerunner, but he himself maintained that his pictures were built on memory and feeling. In Nice there is a museum devoted to his biblical pictures.