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Jewish artist Marc Chagall did not grow up around art. He claimed the concept was totally foreign to him when he one day asked a classmate how he learned to draw. According to the bohttp://blog.newvoices.org/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=11626ok Marc Chagallby Jacob Baal-Teshuva, the friend replied, “Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it.” And that is exactly what he did. Chagall was so pleased with the experience he decided he wanted to become an artist.
Originally named Moishe Shagal, the artist was born in Vitebsk, Belorussia in 1887. The town, with a population of about 66,000, was half Jewish. Due to the circumstances in Russia at that time, Jewish children were not allowed to attend Russian schools. Chagall studied at the local Jewish school until, at the age of 13, his mother successfully bribed the headmaster of a Russian high school to let her son attend.
Following his graduation, Chagall enrolled in an art school in town against his mother’s wishes. He was unhappy there after only a few months. He wanted to create his own kind of paintings, not the conventional portrait styles that were taught in the school. Chagall’s paintings focused on images from his childhood, a theme that lasted throughout his career.
In 1910, the then 23 year old moved to Paris for four years. He did not speak French. Some of his most famous works based on his Jewish village were created during this time. I and the Village (1911), for example, is a painting with hints of Cubism depicting various humans and animals that are reminiscent of his hometown. The piece is now located at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Chagall offered the following insight into his work in MoMA Highlights: “For the Cubists, a painting was a surface covered with forms in a certain order. For me a painting is a surface covered with representations of things . . . in which logic and illustration have no importance.”
In 1914, Chagall exhibited 40 canvases and 160 gouaches in Berlin. The artist then headed back to Vitebsk with the intention of only staying long enough to marry his fiancé, Bella Rosenfeld. But the outbreak of World War I caused Chagall and Rosenfeld to remain in Russia. He was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk in 1917. Chagall later became the director of the Free Academy of Art.
During his time back home, he created Over Vitebsk (1914). One in a series of paintings, each piece features an over-life-size elderly begging man floating above the rooftops. According to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the painting is now housed, Chagall plays on the Yiddish expression for a beggar moving from door to door. The phrase “er geyt iher di hayzer” translations as “he walks over the houses.”
Chagall returned to Paris in 1923, where he lived until he and his family fled to the United States in 1941 due to the growing threats of World War II. Most of their time was spent around New York City. When Chagall’s wife died in 1944, he became depressed and set his work aside for some time. Eventually he started to work again designing sets and costumes for Russian ballets. The artist returned to France in 1948 where he lived until his death in 1985. He was 97 years old.
Chagall worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Using stained glass, he created windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz in France, windows for the United Nations and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. Chagall also painted part of the ceiling in the Paris Opera House. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Marc Chagall as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century.”
Marc says…
“If a painter is Jewish and paints life, how can he help having Jewish elements in his work! But if he is a good painter, there will be more than that. The Jewish element will be there, but his art will tend to approach the universal.” (www.myjewishlearning.com)
“If I were not a Jew: I wouldn’t have been an artist, or I would be a different artists all together.” (www.moodbook.com)
