Marc Chagall

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Marc Chagall spent nearly a century alive on earth, and almost every one of those years was spent either fleeing something or painting it. Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in a Jewish family near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, he died in 1985 as one of the last surviving figures of early European modernism. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century." Art historian Michael J. Lewis went further, calling him "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists." Pablo Picasso, in the 1950s, offered perhaps the most striking tribute: "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is."

  The life behind that reputation crossed the Russian Empire, Paris, Berlin, occupied France, Mexico, New York, and back to France again. It was shaped by two world wars, a revolution, the near-extermination of the culture that formed him, and a devotion to a small city in Belarus that never loosened its grip on his imagination. The questions his story raises are not simple ones. How does an artist hold onto a world that is disappearing? What does it mean to become the public witness of a civilization that has been destroyed? And how did a boy from a wooden city of synagogues and herring merchants end up painting the ceiling of the Paris Opera?

• 2. Vitebsk and the Pale

  ›

  Vitebsk, where Chagall grew up, had a population of about 66,000 at the time of his birth, and more than half of its residents were Jewish. The artist Ilya Repin called it the "Russian Toledo," comparing it to the cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire. The city was built mostly of wood, and little of it survived the destruction of World War II.

  Chagall was the eldest of nine children. His family name, Shagal, is a variant of Segal, a name typically borne in Jewish communities by Levitic families. His father, Khatskl Shagal, worked for a herring merchant, carrying heavy barrels for 20 roubles a month, at a time when the average wage across the Russian Empire was 13 roubles. Chagall wrote of his father: "Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave." His mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home.

  Vitebsk sat inside the Pale of Settlement, the region to which the Imperial Russian government had confined Jews from the late 18th century through the First World War. This zone covered roughly what is today Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia. The confinement gave rise to the Jewish market-villages, the shtetls, each with their own schools, hospitals, and community institutions. From the 1730s, Vitebsk itself had been a center of Hasidic culture, with teachings derived from the Kabbalah.

  Chagall later wrote as a boy, "I felt at every step that I was a Jew." During pogroms he recorded the terror with searing precision: "The street lamps are out. I feel panicky, especially in front of butchers' windows." When asked by pogromniks whether he was a Jew, he denied it to survive. Most of what is known about these years comes from his autobiography, My Life, in which he described the Hasidic traditions he had grown up with as fast disappearing, and his own need to document them before they vanished entirely.

• 3. Learning to See

  ›

  Jewish children in the Russian Empire were barred from regular schools, and universities imposed strict quotas on Jewish enrollment. Chagall received his early education at a local Jewish religious school, studying Hebrew and the Bible. At 13, his mother tried to enroll him in a regular high school. She walked up to the headmaster and offered him 50 roubles to admit her son, and he accepted.

  The turn toward art came through a classmate. A fellow student was drawing, and Chagall scholar Jacob Baal-Teshuva writes that watching this was for the young Chagall "like a vision, a revelation in black and white." Chagall asked his friend how he had learned. The friend replied, "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it." That was enough. Chagall began copying images from books and decided he wanted to become a painter.

  In 1906, he noticed the studio of Yehuda Pen, a realist artist who ran a drawing school in Vitebsk. Future artists El Lissitzky and Ossip Zadkine were also studying there at the same time. Because Chagall was young and without income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. After a few months, however, Chagall concluded that academic portrait painting was not for him. That same year he moved to Saint Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire and the center of its artistic life, using a temporary passport borrowed from a friend because Jews were not permitted into the city without one. Between 1908 and 1910, he studied under Léon Bakst, a Jewish designer of stage sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, who acted as a model for what Jewish artistic success could look like. Art historian Raymond Cogniat wrote that after four years of living and studying on his own, "Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art." It was also in Saint Petersburg that Chagall first met Bella Rosenfeld, whom he described in My Life: "Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future."

• 4. Paris and the Birth of a Style

  ›

  In 1910, Chagall arrived in Paris at the age of 23, unable to speak French and often so lonely he considered fleeing back to Russia. Cubism was the dominant art form. But curator James Sweeney notes that Chagall came from Russia with qualities alien to Paris at that time: "a ripe color gift, a fresh, unashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense of humor." His first admirers were not painters but poets, among them Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire.

  He enrolled at the Académie de La Palette, where Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, and Henri Le Fauconnier taught. He spent free hours at the Louvre and in Montmartre. He learned the technique of gouache and used it to paint Russian scenes while living in the heart of France. He developed friendships with Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger, yet he refused to align himself with any single movement.

  Art historian Jean Leymarie notes that Chagall thought of art as "emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring," which was the reverse of the Cubist method. In his canvases he developed a repertoire of recurring motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky, a gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, livestock, transparent wombs with tiny figures sleeping inside them. Apollinaire was struck by this quality in his work and called it "surnaturel." André Breton later said that "with him alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting." Chagall himself insisted his symbols had personal rather than programmatic meaning: he did not want his work claimed by any school. He had also begun a habit that would continue for decades, painting the town he had left behind. As Sweeney writes, the majority of his scenes of Vitebsk were painted while living in Paris, and "in a sense they were dreams."

• 5. Revolution and the Vitebsk School

  ›

  A visit to Berlin for a gallery exhibition at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery brought Chagall critical praise in Germany. He had brought 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors, and drawings. The exhibit was a success, and the German critics, Baal-Teshuva writes, "positively sang his praises." Chagall had intended to continue on to Russia, marry Bella, and return to Paris. Instead, the First World War broke out a few weeks after he arrived in Vitebsk, closing the border indefinitely. A year later he married Bella Rosenfeld, and they had a daughter, Ida.

  By the time the October Revolution arrived in 1917, Chagall was 30 years old and one of Imperial Russia's most distinguished artists, a member of the modernist avant-garde. In November 1917, Anatoly Lunacharsky offered him charge of the visual arts department of Narkompros in Petrograd. Chagall refused, having no interest in politics. But by the summer of 1918, he reconsidered and was appointed commissar of arts for Vitebsk. He founded both the People's Art College, known as "the Academy," and the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art, drawing major artists including El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich to the faculty. The creation of the museum marked what came to be called the "Vitebsk Renaissance," making the town one of the recognized avant-garde centers of the early 20th century.

  The experiment collapsed when faculty members who preferred Suprematist art, with its squares and circles, disapproved of what they called Chagall's "bourgeois individualism." In May 1920, the Suprematists took over the Academy and Chagall resigned. He moved to Moscow, where he was offered work as a stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. For its opening, staging plays by Sholem Aleichem, he created large background murals using techniques learned from Bakst. One mural was 9 feet tall and 24 feet long, filled with dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. A critic at the time called it "Hebrew jazz in paint." In 1921, while working as an art teacher in a Jewish boys' shelter in suburban Malakhovka, which housed orphans displaced by pogroms, he created illustrations for the Yiddish poetry cycle Grief, written by another teacher at the shelter, David Hofstein.

• 6. Flight and Loss

  ›

  Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany began not long after Chagall returned to Paris in 1923 to resume his career. Beginning in 1937, about twenty thousand works from German museums were confiscated as "degenerate" under a campaign directed by Joseph Goebbels. German authorities, who had once praised Chagall's work, now described his paintings as depicting "green, purple, and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air" and as an assault on Western civilization.

  The Chagalls remained in Vichy France, unaware that French Jews were being collected and sent to German concentration camps. After the Vichy government began approving anti-Semitic laws in October 1940 at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, and after Jews began losing public and academic positions, the Chagalls finally understood the danger. But Wullschlager notes that "by then they were trapped." They could not afford the passage to New York or the large bond required of immigrants upon entry to the United States.

  Salvation came through his daughter Ida, who pushed them to act, and through Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art, who had Chagall's name added to a list of artists whose lives were at risk. Varian Fry, a US journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the US Vice-Consul in Marseille, ran an operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe using forged visas. In April 1941, the Chagalls were stripped of their French citizenship. They were arrested at the Hotel Moderne in Marseille. Fry pressured the French police to release them by threatening a scandal. In May 1941, Chagall and Bella departed. On the 10th of June 1941, they left Lisbon aboard the Portuguese ship Mouzinho, which also carried 119 refugee children to whom Chagall gave drawing lessons during the voyage. The ship reached Staten Island on the 21st of June 1941, the day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

  On the 2nd of September 1944, Bella died suddenly from a streptococcus infection. The Mercy General Hospital had no penicillin due to wartime restrictions. Chagall stopped all work for many months. In a letter published shortly after the liberation of Paris, he wrote of her: "I lost my wife, the companion of my life, the woman who was my inspiration." He described her last joy as the liberation of Paris.

• 7. The Jerusalem Windows

  ›

  Chagall came to stained glass relatively late. It was not until 1956, when he was nearly 70, that he designed windows for the Église Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy, commissioned at the behest of Father Couturier, a monk credited with reviving religious art in France. From 1958 to 1960 he created windows for Metz Cathedral, working with glassmaker Charles Marq, and their collaboration centered on how variations in natural lighting could transform the finished work.

  In 1960, he began what would become his most celebrated work in the medium: twelve stained glass windows for the synagogue of Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, each representing one of the twelve tribes of Israel. He envisaged the synagogue as "a crown offered to the Jewish Queen" and the windows as "jewels of translucent fire." Each window is approximately 11 feet high and 8 feet wide. Upon completion in 1961 they were exhibited in Paris and then at the Museum of Modern Art in New York before being installed permanently in Jerusalem in February 1962.

  French philosopher Gaston Bachelard said of Chagall's relationship to the text behind the images: "Chagall reads the Bible and suddenly the passages become light." Art historian Jean Leymarie described the windows in terms that reached beyond aesthetics, writing that their essence lies in Chagall's ability "to animate material and transform it into light" in a way that is "simultaneously jewel-hard and foamy, reverberating and penetrating, radiating light from an unknown interior." At the dedication in 1962, Chagall said: "For me a stained glass window is a..." The windows symbolize the twelve tribes blessed by both Jacob and Moses in the closing verses of Genesis and Deuteronomy. In 1973, Israel issued a 12-stamp set reproducing their images, one stamp for each window.

• 8. The Paris Opera Ceiling

  ›

  In 1963, France's Minister of Culture André Malraux commissioned Chagall to paint a new ceiling for the Paris Opera, formally the Palais Garnier, a 19th-century national monument. The choice caused immediate controversy. Some objected to having a Russian Jew decorate a French national monument; others objected to a modern artist repainting the ceiling of a historic building. Chagall, by then a naturalized French citizen who had spent decades working in France for little or no payment, commented: "It is amazing the way the French resent foreigners. You live here most of your life. You become a naturalized French citizen... work for nothing decorating their cathedrals, and still they despise you."

  Chagall was 77 years old when he took on the project, and it took him one year to complete. The final canvas measured nearly 2,400 square feet, required 440 pounds of paint, and was divided into five sections that were glued to polyester panels and hoisted to a 70-foot ceiling. The images paid tribute to composers including Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz, and Ravel, as well as to celebrated actors and dancers.

  The work was presented to the public on the 23rd of September 1964, in the presence of Malraux and 2,100 invited guests. The opera's orchestra played the finale of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, Chagall's favorite, and as the final bars played the central chandelier was lit, bringing the ceiling to life. Even the bitterest opponents of the commission fell silent. Malraux said afterward: "What other living artist could have painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera in the way Chagall did?... many of his canvases and the Opera ceiling represent sublime images that rank among the finest poetry of our time, just as Titian produced the finest poetry of his day." In his speech that evening, Chagall dedicated the work as "a gift of gratitude to France and her École de Paris, without which there would be no colour and no freedom."