Marc Chagall

Anyone asking who was Marc Chagall must begin in Vitebsk, a town in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, where Moishe Shagal was born on July 14, 1887, the eldest of nine children ^[1]. His father, Khatskl, hauled herring barrels for a fish merchant; his mother, Feiga-Ita, ran a small grocery from the family home. The household was poor, observant, and Yiddish-speaking, and the rhythms of Hasidic life, its festivals, weddings, and klezmer musicians, supplied the imagery Chagall would repaint for the rest of his life ^[2].

Jewish children in the Pale were normally barred from Russian public schools, but his mother reportedly paid a bribe to enroll him, an act he later credited with opening his path ^[1]. At school he encountered drawing for the first time and, against his family's expectations, announced that he wanted to be an artist. Around 1906 he began studying in the Vitebsk studio of Yehuda Pen, a realist painter who taught a generation of Jewish artists from the region ^[3].

In 1907 Chagall moved to Saint Petersburg, where Jews needed residence permits and work was precarious. He studied at the school of the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and later under Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School, absorbing the theatrical color of the World of Art circle ^[2]. During visits home he met Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a prosperous Vitebsk jeweler, who became his fiancée, his lifelong muse, and the model for the airborne brides of his most famous canvases ^[1].

A stipend from Maxim Vinaver, a lawyer and member of the Duma who collected art, allowed Chagall to move to Paris in 1911 ^[2]. He settled in La Ruche, the beehive-shaped colony of studios in Montparnasse, alongside Fernand Léger, Chaim Soutine, and Amedeo Modigliani, and he befriended the poets Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire ^[3]. Paris gave him Cubist structure and Fauvist color, but he bent both toward remembered Vitebsk. Paintings from this first French period, including I and the Village (1911) and Paris Through the Window (1913), fused fractured planes with cows, peasants, and rooftops from home ^[4].

Apollinaire recommended him to the Berlin dealer Herwarth Walden, whose gallery Der Sturm gave Chagall a substantial solo exhibition in June 1914, an event that established his reputation among the German avant-garde ^[3]. Chagall then traveled to Vitebsk for what he expected to be a short visit. The outbreak of the First World War closed the borders behind him, and he remained in Russia for eight years ^[2].

He married Bella in July 1915, and their daughter Ida was born the following year ^[1]. After the 1917 revolution, the new Soviet government named him Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk, where he founded the Vitebsk People's Art School in 1918 ^[4]. He invited Kazimir Malevich to teach there, a decision he came to regret: Malevich's Suprematist faction won over the students, and Chagall left for Moscow in 1920. There he painted murals for the State Jewish Chamber Theater, works now regarded as landmarks of Russian modernism ^[4]. Disillusioned with Soviet cultural politics, he left Russia in 1922 and, after a stay in Berlin, returned to Paris in 1923 ^[2].

Any account of Marc Chagall achievements has to reckon with his range across media as much as with individual masterpieces. Back in Paris, the dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned etchings for Gogol's Dead Souls, La Fontaine's Fables, and the Bible, projects that occupied Chagall intermittently for decades and made him one of the century's most accomplished printmakers ^[5]. The Bible etchings, begun in 1931 after a journey to Palestine, were finally published by Tériade in 1956 ^[5].

His paintings of the interwar years deepened in feeling and darkened in subject. White Crucifixion (1938), which places a Jewish Jesus wrapped in a prayer shawl amid scenes of pogrom and burning synagogues, responded directly to Nazi persecution and is held by the Art Institute of Chicago ^[6]. Earlier canvases such as The Birthday (1915) and Over the Town (1914 to 1918) had already fixed his signature image of lovers floating above the earth ^[4].

After 1950 Chagall expanded into monumental public art. He designed stained glass windows for the cathedral at Metz, the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem (twelve windows representing the tribes of Israel, dedicated in 1962), the United Nations building in New York, and churches in Reims, Mainz, and Zurich ^[7]. In 1964 he completed a new ceiling for the Palais Garnier, the Paris Opera, at the invitation of culture minister André Malraux, and in 1966 he delivered two vast murals, The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music, for the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center ^[2]. He also produced tapestries for the Knesset in Jerusalem, mosaics, ceramics, and sets and costumes for ballets including Stravinsky's The Firebird ^[7].

Bella Rosenfeld was the emotional center of Chagall's world for three decades. Their marriage in 1915 began a partnership in which she served as first critic, subject, and, in his telling, the source of the flight and tenderness in his art ^[1]. Her sudden death from a viral infection in September 1944, while the family was in exile in New York State, devastated him; he reportedly turned his canvases to the wall and did not paint for months ^[2].

In the late 1940s he began a relationship with Virginia Haggard McNeil, with whom he had a son, David, born in 1946. The couple lived together in France until Virginia left him in 1952 ^[1]. That same year Chagall married Valentina Brodsky, known as Vava, a Russian-born Londoner who managed his affairs with famous strictness for the rest of his life ^[2].

Chagall's Jewish identity remained the axis of his personal and artistic world even as he lived most of his life in Catholic France and accepted commissions for Christian churches. He wrote poetry in Yiddish, composed a memoir, My Life, first drafted in Moscow around 1922, and returned constantly to biblical themes he described as the greatest source of poetry of all time ^[5]. He became a French citizen in 1937, a status revoked under Vichy and later restored ^[3].

The Second World War nearly cost Chagall his life. After the fall of France the family moved south, but as a Jew he was stripped of citizenship and briefly arrested in Marseille in 1941. The American journalist Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, aided by an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art, secured his escape, and the Chagalls reached New York in June 1941 ^[6]. In America he designed sets and costumes for the Ballet Theatre's Aleko (1942) and The Firebird (1945) and mourned both Bella and the destruction of Vitebsk, which was largely razed during the German occupation ^[2].

He returned to France permanently in 1948 and settled on the Riviera, first in Vence and from 1966 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence ^[3]. The postwar decades brought honors and enormous productivity: retrospectives at the Louvre and the Grand Palais, the Erasmus Prize in 1960, and the opening in Nice in 1973 of the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, a national museum built for a living artist to house his biblical cycle ^[7]. That same year the Soviet government invited him back for a visit to Moscow and Leningrad, his first return since 1922, though he declined to visit Vitebsk ^[2].

Chagall kept working into his tenth decade, producing lithographs, stained glass, and paintings with little slackening. He died at Saint-Paul-de-Vence on March 28, 1985, at the age of 97, reportedly after riding the elevator up to his studio, and was buried in the town's cemetery ^[1].

Chagall occupies an unusual position in modern art history: a modernist who absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, and even anticipated Surrealist dream imagery, yet who refused every label. André Breton praised him for restoring metaphor to modern painting, while Picasso is often credited with remarking that after Matisse, Chagall was the only painter left who truly understood color ^[2]. Critics have sometimes faulted the sentimentality of his late work, but his prewar canvases are secure in the modernist canon, and his prints, some thousands of etchings and lithographs, shaped twentieth century book illustration ^[5].

He is also remembered as the preeminent painter of East European Jewish life. The fiddler on the roof that recurs in his Vitebsk scenes lent its image, and indirectly its name, to the 1964 Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, carrying his iconography deep into popular culture ^[6]. His stained glass demonstrated that a Jewish artist could renew an art form long tied to Christian churches, and his Jerusalem, Metz, Reims, and Zurich windows still draw visitors ^[7].

Basic Marc Chagall facts point to the scale of his afterlife: a dedicated national museum in Nice, major holdings at MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tretyakov Gallery, and auction prices for his paintings that have exceeded 28 million dollars ^[6]. Any Marc Chagall biography ends where his art always began, in a small Belarusian town he transformed into one of the permanent landscapes of the modern imagination ^[4].