In this picture, taken by Roger Viollet, Marc Chagall works on a painting in France in August 1934, shortly after the Nazis took power. The image, colorized by Duriez, captures the essence of one of Pablo Picasso’s remarks: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter who understands what colour really is.” As an artist, he used color to show movement and rhythm, and he typically did not overuse colors, but relied on a few which he blended together.
Marc Chagall, who was born Moishe Shagal on July 6, 1887 in a Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family in Liozna in Belarus. Chagall was an early modernist and was associated with several artistic styles. He worked in a wide range of artistic mediums, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, ceramics, tapestries, and fine art prints. He also worked on large scale projects, creating stained glass windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, the UN, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He also painted part of the ceiling of the Paris Opera.
His Introduction To Art
FRANCE - CIRCA 1934: Marc Chagall (1887-1985), French painter. August 1934. (Photo by Roger Viollet via Getty Images/Roger Viollet via Getty Images)
He had his early education at the local Jewish religious school. At 13, Chagall’s mother paid a headmaster at a regular high school to allow him to attend. He had his artistic awakening when he saw a classmate drawing as there was no art in his home, and when Chagall asked the classmate how he learned to draw, the classmate told him to just choose a picture and copy. He decided he wanted to become a painter and took classes for a few months at a drawing school. Chagall made the choice to integrate his Jewish roots into his artwork.
Moving To Paris For The First Time
Cavary (Golgotha) 1912. Source: (Wikipedia).
He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1906, enrolling in an art school and studying there for two years. He studied under Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting between 1908 and 1910. During this time, he frequently visited Vitebsk, where he met Bella Rosenfeld.
Chagall moved to Paris in 1910 Paris during modernism’s height, synthesizing Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism. Cubism was the dominant art form in Paris at the time. Despite his inability to speak French and his loneliness, he enrolled in an avant-garde art school and spent time visiting galleries and salons, studying artists such as Rembrandt, Manet, Gaugin, and Matisse. In Paris, he learned gouache.
A Style Of His Own
Lovers Above Town. Source: (Pinterest).
His paintings continued to draw on Jewish motifs, but he started to include Parisian scenes. He also produced updated versions of earlier paintings, transformed using Fauvist and Cubist styles. During this time, prior to World War I, he traveled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin, creating his own style based in is idea of Eastern Europe and Jewish folk culture. He started to develop unconventional motifs, such as ghostly figures floating through the sky and the fiddler dancing on a dollhouse.
To Russia And Back
With Bella. Source: (Pinterest).
In 1914, he returned to Belarus, where he intended to marry Bella and return with her to Paris. Shortly after he returned, World War I began, and the border was closed. He married Bella and they had their first child, Ida. He started to exhibit his work in Moscow and began receiving recognition for his art; using ink drawings, he also illustrated Yiddish books, including I.L. Peretz’s The Magician. After the October Revolution of 1917, he accepted the job of commissar of arts for Vitebsk, which led him to found the Vitebsk Arts College. He then moved to Moscow, where he worked as a stage designer for the State Jewish Chamber theater; for its opening he created background murals which one critic called “Hebrew jazz in paint.” As the Russian Civil War continued, poverty and famine spread, and he spent the time between 1921 and 1922 living in primitive conditions. He decided to return to France; while waiting for his exit visa, he wrote his autobiography, My Life.
Illustrating The Bible
Abraham and Three Angels. Source: (WikiArt).
He stopped in Berlin on his way to France in 1923, with the intention of retrieving the art he had left there on exhibit 10 years before, however he was unable to recover any of them. He then started to try to paint from his memories. During this time, he also began to create etchings for illustrated books, including Gogol’s
Dead Souls and the Bible. He had his first exhibition in the U.S. in 1926 at the Reinhardt gallery of New York. Chagall also spent time traveling through France and other nearby countries. After one of his trips, Ambrose Vollard, a French art dealer, commissioned him to illustrate the Old Testament. To complete the project, he traveled to Tel Aviv, where he remained for two months. He began immersing himself in Jewish history and between 1931 and 1934, he worked tirelessly on the Bible, even traveling to Amsterdam to study Rembrandt and El Greco. He returned to France shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany, which had detrimental effects on art, as the Nazis started their assault on art once they seized power.
Fleeing To America
The Firebird. Source: (arthive).
Chagall and Bella finally fled France, arriving in New York on June 23, 1941. Their daughter Ida and her husband Michel followed, carrying a case of Chagall’s work. Intelligence analyst Konrad Kellen would later bring more paintings to America.
