Marc Chagall

Vitebsk

Moishe Shagal was born on 6 July 1887 in Liozna, near Vitebsk, in what was then the Russian Empire and is now Belarus, the eldest of nine children. His father worked hauling barrels in a herring warehouse; his mother sold groceries from the house.

The family was Hasidic Jewish and poor, living in the Pale of Settlement, the western region where Jews were required by law to live. Vitebsk was about half Jewish, a town of wooden houses, synagogues, markets and mud streets, and Chagall painted it for the rest of his life from thousands of miles away.

Jewish religious practice discouraged figurative image-making, and there was no obvious route from a herring warehouse to painting. His mother took him to a local painter, Yehuda Pen, and paid for lessons.

Saint Petersburg and Bella

In 1906 Chagall went to Saint Petersburg, where Jews needed a permit to live. He got in on a temporary pass, was briefly jailed for lacking one, studied under the stage designer Léon Bakst, and lived on almost nothing.

In 1909 he met Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Vitebsk jeweller. She was educated, ambitious and far above him socially, and they married in 1915. She is in a great many of the paintings, often flying.

Chagall wrote that when he met her he felt she had known him all his life. She remained the central figure of his work for thirty-five years.

Paris, 1911

In 1911 a patron gave Chagall a stipend, and he went to Paris. He arrived speaking little French and knowing almost nobody.

He took a studio at La Ruche, at 2 passage de Dantzig in the fifteenth arrondissement: a rotunda of cheap studios built out of Gustave Eiffel's wine pavilion from the 1900 Exposition, where dozens of poor artists worked. Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Léger and Ossip Zadkine were among them. He painted I and the Village and Paris Through the Window there.[1]

He met the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, who named several of his pictures. Apollinaire, looking at the work, coined a word for it: surnaturel.[2]

Paris gave him Cubism and Fauvism, and he took what he wanted: the fractured planes and the free colour, applied to Russian-Jewish village subjects that no Cubist would have painted. I and the Village, painted in 1911, is the result — a green-faced man and a cow facing each other, with a milkmaid and an upside-down woman in the background.[3]

Revolution and commissar

Chagall went home to Vitebsk in 1914 for what he expected to be a short visit. The First World War closed the borders and he stayed for eight years.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917 he was appointed commissar for the arts in the Vitebsk region, and he founded the People's Art School there. For the first anniversary of the revolution he had the town painted with flying figures and green cows, and the local officials asked why the cows were green and what they had to do with Marx.[1]

He recruited teachers including Kazimir Malevich, whose austere geometric Suprematism was the opposite of everything Chagall painted. Malevich took over the school. Chagall left in 1920, worked in the Jewish theatre in Moscow painting enormous murals, and left Russia for good in 1922.[4]

Between the wars

Chagall settled in France in 1923. The dealer Ambroise Vollard commissioned him to illustrate Gogol's Dead Souls, La Fontaine's Fables and the Bible — projects that took decades and produced hundreds of etchings.[1]

The Bible commission sent him to Palestine, Syria and Egypt in 1931. He was not religious in an observant sense, but the biblical subjects became a permanent part of his work.[3]

He became a French citizen in 1937. The same year the Nazi regime included his work in its exhibition of so-called degenerate art in Munich, and German museums removed his paintings.

Escape

When France fell in 1940, Chagall was living in the south. He was slow to understand the danger, believing his French citizenship would protect him.

His French citizenship did not protect him. Vichy stripped him of it. He was arrested in a round-up in Marseille in 1941 and released after intervention. The American journalist Varian Fry, who ran a rescue operation for artists and intellectuals in Marseille, and the American vice-consul Hiram Bingham got the family out, and an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art secured the visas.[1]

The Chagalls reached New York in June 1941, the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union.[5]

Bella's death

Bella died in New York on 2 September 1944, of a bacterial infection that went untreated because wartime hospitals were short of penicillin. She was forty-eight.[1]

Chagall stopped working for nine months. When he began again he turned all his canvases to the wall for a time, and the paintings that followed are full of her.

He returned to France in 1948. In 1952 he married Valentina Brodsky, known as Vava, who managed his affairs for the rest of his life.[1]

The late public work

From the 1950s Chagall worked increasingly at architectural scale, which suited an artist whose imagery was made of colour and light.

He made stained glass for the cathedrals at Metz and Reims, for the church at Mainz, for a church in Kent and for the Fraumünster in Zurich. For the synagogue of the Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem he made twelve windows, one for each of the twelve tribes of Israel, completed in 1962. He designed the windows for the United Nations building in New York, and made mosaics and tapestries for public buildings.[3]

In 1963 André Malraux, the French culture minister, commissioned him to repaint the ceiling of the Paris Opera. Chagall was seventy-six, Russian-born and Jewish, and the commission caused a public row about whether a foreigner should paint over a French monument. He painted it in five sections on canvas, 220 square metres in all, in a design honouring fourteen composers from Mozart to Stravinsky and filled with landmarks of Paris. It was installed over the existing ceiling without damaging it in 1964. He was seventy-seven, and he took no fee.[1]

Death

Chagall died at Saint-Paul-de-Vence on 28 March 1985, aged ninety-seven, having taken the lift up to his studio the same evening. He is buried in the village cemetery.[1]

He had worked for seventy-five years and outlived nearly everyone he began with.

Why Marc Chagall matters

Chagall did something no one else in modern art did. He took the visual vocabulary of Paris, Cubist fracture and Fauvist colour, and used it on a subject the Paris avant-garde had no interest in. That subject was Jewish village life in the Pale of Settlement, a world largely destroyed within his lifetime. The paintings are now among the main visual records of it.

The Centre Pompidou in Paris holds a substantial group of the paintings.

His second life, from his sixties onwards, was public and architectural. The windows at Metz, Reims and Jerusalem, the United Nations glass, the Opera ceiling and the mosaics put his colour into buildings that thousands of people pass through, which is a scale of audience most painters never reach.

La Ruche today

La Ruche, the rotunda of cheap studios where Chagall worked before the First World War, still houses artists today.