Marc Chagall
(Peskowatik near Vitebsk, Russian Empire, today Belarus 1887 - Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France 1885)
Marc Chagall was born in 1887 as the eldest of nine children of a Jewish family in the Russian Empire. He received his first artistic training at a private art school in St. Petersburg. During his studies with Léon Bakst, Chagall often went to Vitebsk and met his future wife Bella Rosenfeld there.
He then went to Paris, where the current art movements and the avant-garde influenced his painting. He lived in an artists' settlement in the 15th arrondissement, where he found himself in the midst of the international bohemian Parisian. Chagall met the avant-garde of Montparnasse such as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire and the painters Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani. He soon formed a special friendship with Apollinaire, Delaunay and Léger. Those around him at the time called him “le poète, the“ poet ”.
Chagall took part in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne. It was there that he saw the work of the Fauvists and Cubists for the first time. In Paris, Chagall discovered the technique of gouache for himself and this became his preferred means of artistic expression. Hundreds of gouaches were made during Chagall's time in Paris. Only when he was convinced of the result from the start did Chagall paint on canvas. The result was hardly more than forty canvases, which he prepared with gouache paintings.
The first solo exhibition of Marc Chagall's works took place in Berlin, in Herwarth Walden's “Der Sturm” gallery. When the First World War broke out, Chagall was in his native Vitebsk, where he married Bella Rosenfeld in 1915 and was appointed Commissioner for the Fine Arts in 1918. In the meantime, the couple also lived in St. Petersburg, now Petrograd, where they also witnessed the February Revolution of 1917.
With the outbreak of the October Revolution, the family returned to Vitebsk. There Chagall founded an art academy in 1919, the Vitebsk Art School, at which El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malevich also taught. Chagall clashed with Malevich again and again because of the conflict over the direction of future art at the time. Malevich was one of the leading figures with his painting “Black Square”, he propagated his art as “pure painting”, which was not compatible with Chagall's view, and so Chagall resigned from the management of the academy in 1920 and moved to Moscow with his family where they lived in poverty for a while.
Chagall kept the family afloat with designs for murals, decorations and costumes for the “Jewish Theater”. The state demand for his work slackened sharply at the time, as it no longer fit into the official art ideology. Since Malevich set the tone at the time and didn't think much of Chagall, the latter struggled hard.
In 1922 Chagall and his family finally turned their backs on their Russian homeland and lived first in Berlin, then from 1923 in Paris. The renowned art dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to illustrate Nikolai Gogol's novel “The Dead Souls”. From 1927 further orders for illustration cycles followed, including for the fables of La Fontaine. This was a very productive time in which Chagall re-painted his pictures, lost in the First World War, from reproductions or from his memories. He did this not only to compensate for his financial losses, but also to live up to his idea that his pictures are “always a piece of his artistic self”. So he painted many of his pictures a second time.
From 1931 to 1939, and then again from 1952, Chagall worked on Bible illustrations that appeared in 1956.
In 1941 Marc Chagall and his family emigrated to the USA. In 1946 the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed the first comprehensive retrospective of his works. Chagall returned to Paris in 1947 and finally settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1950, where he lived and worked until his death in 1985.
In addition to working on his paintings, he created extensive etching cycles and many lithographs. From 1950 to 1970 Chagall also carried out numerous commissions for public buildings. He designed stained glass windows for the cathedrals of Metz and Notre Dame in Reims, the synagogue of the Hadassah University Clinic in Jerusalem and the Stefanskirche in Mainz. From 1963 he painted a large-format ceiling painting in the dome above the auditorium for the Opéra Garnier in Paris. From 1964 the murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York were created.
The main themes of Marc Chagall's art are motifs from his family environment, from Russian folk art, Jewish mysticism, his hometown Vitebsk, from the Bible and the circus. He also created scenes combined with dream images. So, he had his own repertoire of symbols, which also kept recurring in his mosaics, the glass windows and theater backdrops he designed. These motifs include the lovers, the crescent moon, the rooster and the Jewish shtetl. Chagall is considered one of the most important painters of the 20th century and is often assigned to expressionism.