Marc Chagall Overview

Chagall was born into a tradition-steeped Russian household, which inspired in him a love of Russian-Jewish folktales and a deep reverence for the Jewish religion. From these elements he created the fantastical, personal paintings that relate a sense of fairytale atemporality -- in short, a poetical sensibility. This imaginative and dreamy imagery has often caused Chagall to be identified as a forerunner of Surrealism. The young Chagall attended several art schools, but he did not succeed in his studies until he came under the tutelage of Leon Bakst, a theater designer intellectually connected to France who introduced Chagall to Fauvism. Chagall pursued these ideas, moving to France in 1910, where he entered the society of the Cubists and other artists such as Apollinaire and Modigliani. Under these influences, Chagall began producing boldly colored paintings that combined Cubism's sense of space with his own innate, lyrical content. The results of this stylistic blending were fresh, formally contemporary, richly symbolic paintings emanating a mythic narrative. All of these elements of form and content can be seen in Chagall's "I and the Village" series. The works contain images of country life in his Hasidic hometown, where people and the animals on which they depend live in an intimate, almost mystical symbiosis. The cow and the bull figure in many of Chagall's paintings as a cosmic symbols of the sun and moon. With this combination of a deeply personal vocabulary with dynamic formal technique, Chagall virtually created his own genre. In 1914, this incarnation of Chagall's work was exhibited in Berlin, attracting the attention of the German Expressionists. Chagall was stranded in Russia during World War I and during the revolution he became a commissar for art. He quit his post after his ambitions for a local academy and museum met with political and aesthetic acrimony. He then spent a fruitful year painting murals and designing settings for the Yiddish theater in Moscow. This large-scale theatrical work inspired much of his later painting, and he continued to create sets into the '40s, including the sets and costume designs for Stravinsky's "Firebird." Chagall spent most of the years of World War II in the United States. Returning to France in the late '40s, he continued to create, working in lithography, sculpture, and ceramics. Among his later works are his '60s murals for the ceiling of the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The famous stained glass "Chagall Windows" (1962), at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, are the ideal manifestation of Chagall's potent colorings and his lifetime commitment to the visual portrayal of his Jewish heritage.