Chagall, Marc

Chagall, Marc (1887–1985). Russian-born painter and designer, active mainly in France. He was born in Vitebsk of a deeply religious Jewish family, and trained in St Petersburg, 1906–9 (this included a short period under Bakst). In 1910–14 he lived in Paris, where he was a member of an avant-garde circle including Apollinaire, Delaunay, Léger, Modigliani, and Soutine. After going to Berlin in 1914 for his first one-man show (at the Sturm Gallery) he visited Russia and had to remain because of the outbreak of war. After the Revolution in 1917 he was appointed Fine Arts Commissar for the province of Vitebsk, where he founded and directed an art academy. Malevich was among the other teachers there, and after disagreements with him Chagall moved to Moscow in 1920 and there designed for the newly founded Jewish Theatre. He returned to Paris in 1923 at the invitation of Vollard, who commissioned much work from him, including illustrations for Gogol's Dead Souls, La Fontaine's Fables, and the Bible (eventually published by Tériade in 1948, 1952, and 1956 respectively). In 1941 he moved from occupied France to the USA, where he lived for the next seven years. This period of exile was often painful personally (his first wife died in 1944), but he was honoured as an artist and in 1946 had a retrospective in New York (MOMA) and Chicago (Art Institute). He returned to Paris in 1948 and from 1949 lived near Nice, working to the end of his very long life—the last survivor of the generation of artists who had revolutionized painting in the years leading up to the First World War.

Chagall was prolific as a painter and also as a book illustrator and designer of stained glass (in which he did some of his most impressive late work) and of sets and costumes for the theatre and ballet. His work was dominated by two rich sources of imagery: memories of the Jewish life and folklore of his early years in Russia; and the Bible. He derived some of his spatial dislocations and prismatic colour effects from Cubism and Orphism, but he created a highly distinctive style, remarkable for its sense of fairy-tale fantasy, his figures sometimes floating or hovering in the air. This caused André Breton to claim him as one of the precursors of Surrealism, but Chagall himself stated in his autobiography Ma Vie (1931) that however fanciful and imaginative his pictures appeared, they were based on reality and direct reminiscences of his early years. Often they are specifically autobiographical, as for example The Birthday (MOMA, New York, 1915), showing Chagall's fiancée surprising him with a gift of flowers. There is a museum devoted to Chagall's religious art in Nice. The work there does not always show him at his best, for he could be sentimental and overblown, but his finest paintings have won him an enduring reputation as one of the greatest masters of the École de Paris. At the time of his death, aged 97, a major exhibition of his work was showing at the Royal Academy, London. In the catalogue, Susan Compton writes that ‘There have been few artists this century who have combined such a sensuous enjoyment of the act of painting with such wide-ranging and thought-provoking subject-matter. It is his genius at responding to the age-old comedies and tragedies woven by man into legends and myths which gives Chagall's work in every medium such depth of meaning in addition to its appeal to the eye … he has made reference to very many well-known (and obscure) myths, plays, and even poems—always recreating them for his own ends, just as the great story-tellers have always done.’