Marc Chagall

Marc Zakharovich Chagall (Jul 7, 1887 - Mar 28, 1985) was a Russian-French artist An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century" According to art historian Michael J Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists" For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist" Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra

Before World War I, he traveled between St Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture

Color:
According to Cogniat, in all Chagall's work during all stages of his life, it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention During his earlier years his range was limited by his emphasis on form and his pictures never gave the impression of painted drawings He adds, "The colors are a living, integral part of the picture and are never passively flat, or banal like an afterthought They sculpt and animate the volume of the shapes they indulge in flights of fancy and invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones His colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes and rhythms"

He was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors Cogniat writes, "Chagall is unrivalled in this ability to give a vivid impression of explosive movement with the simplest use of colors" Throughout his life his colors created a "vibrant atmosphere" which was based on "his own personal vision":60

His paintings would later sell for very great prices In October 2010, for example, his painting Bestiaire et Musique, depicting a bride and a fiddler floating in a night sky amid circus performers and animals, "was the star lot" at an auction in Hong Kong When it sold for $41 million, it became the most expensive contemporary Western painting ever sold in Asia

From life memories to fantasy:
Chagall's early life left him with a "powerful visual memory and a pictorial intelligence", writes Goodman After living in France and experiencing the atmosphere of artistic freedom, his "vision soared and he created a new reality, one that drew on both his inner and outer worlds" But it was the images and memories of his early years in Belarus that would sustain his art for more than 70 years

According to Cogniat, there are certain elements in his art that have remained permanent and seen throughout his career One of those was his choice of subjects and the way they were portrayed "The most obviously constant element is his gift for happiness and his instinctive compassion, which even in the most serious subjects prevents him from dramatization":89 Musicians have been a constant during all stages of his work After he first got married, "lovers have sought each other, embraced, caressed, floated through the air, met in wreaths of flowers, stretched, and swooped like the melodious passage of their vivid day-dreams Acrobats contort themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the end of their stems; flowers and foliage abound everywhere" Wullschlager explains the sources for these images:

For him, clowns and acrobats always resembled figures in religious paintings The evolution of the circus works reflects a gradual clouding of his worldview, and the circus performers now gave way to the prophet or sage in his work—a figure into whom Chagall poured his anxiety as Europe darkened, and he could no longer rely on the lumiére-liberté of France for inspiration

Chagall described his love of circus people:

Why am I so touched by their makeup and grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons Chaplin seeks to do in film what I am trying to do in my paintings He is perhaps the only artist today I could get along with without having to say a single word

His early pictures were often of the town where he was born and raised, Vitebsk Cogniat notes that they are realistic and give the impression of firsthand experience by capturing a moment in time with action, often with a dramatic image During his later years, as for instance in the "Bible series", subjects were more dramatic He managed to blend the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color the pictures were always at least acceptable if not powerful He never attempted to present pure reality but always created his atmospheres through fantasy:91 In all cases Chagall's "most persistent subject is life itself, in its simplicity or its hidden complexity He presents for our study places, people, and objects from his own life"

Jewish themes:
After absorbing the techniques of Fauvism and Cubism (under the influence of Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes) Chagall was able to blend these stylistic tendencies with his own folkish style He gave the grim life of Hasidic Jews the "romantic overtones of a charmed world", notes Goodman It was by combining the aspects of Modernism with his "unique artistic language", that he was able to catch the attention of critics and collectors throughout Europe Generally, it was his boyhood of living in a Belarusian provincial town that gave him a continual source of imaginative stimuli Chagall would become one of many Jewish émigrés who later became noted artists, all of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most numerous and creative minorities", notes Goodman:13

World War I, which ended in 1918, had displaced nearly a million Jews and destroyed what remained of the provincial shtetl culture that had defined life for most Eastern European Jews for centuries Goodman notes, "The fading of traditional Jewish society left artists like Chagall with powerful memories that could no longer be fed by a tangible reality Instead, that culture became an emotional and intellectual source that existed solely in memory and the imagination So rich had the experience been, it sustained him for the rest of his life":15 Sweeney adds that "if you ask Chagall to explain his paintings, he would reply, 'I don't understand them at all They are not literature They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me":7

In 1948, after returning to France from the US after the war, he saw for himself the destruction that the war had brought to Europe and the Jewish populations In 1951, as part of a memorial book dedicated to eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France, he wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950", which inspired paintings such as the Song of David (see photo):

I see the fire, the smoke and the gas; rising to the blue cloud, turning it black I see the torn-out hair, the pulled-out teeth They overwhelm me with my rabid palette I stand in the desert before heaps of boots, clothing, ash and dung, and mumble my Kaddish And as I stand—from my paintings, the painted David descends to me, harp in hand He wants to help me weep and recite chapters of Psalms:114–115

Lewis writes that Chagall "remains the most important visual artist to have borne witness to the world of East European Jewry and inadvertently became the public witness of a now vanished civilization" Although Judaism has religious inhibitions about pictorial art of many religious subjects, Chagall managed to use his fantasy images as a form of visual metaphor combined with folk imagery His "Fiddler on the Roof", for example, combines a folksy village setting with a fiddler as a way to show the Jewish love of music as important to the Jewish spirit

Music played an important role in shaping the subjects of his work While he later came to love the music of Bach and Mozart, during his youth he was mostly influenced by the music within the the Hasidic community where he was raised Art historian Franz Meyer points out that one of the main reasons for the unconventional nature of his work is related to the hassidism which inspired the world of his childhood and youth and had actually impressed itself on most Eastern European Jews since the 18th century He writes, "For Chagall this is one of the deepest sources, not of inspiration, but of a certain spiritual attitude the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment of his art":24 In a talk that Chagall gave in 1963 while visiting America, he discussed some of those impressions

However, Chagall had a complex relationship with Judaism On the one hand, he credited his Russian Jewish cultural background as being crucial to his artistic imagination But however ambivalent he was about his religion, he could not avoid drawing upon his Jewish past for artistic material As an adult, he was not a practicing Jew, but through his paintings and stained glass, he continually tried to suggest a more "universal message", using both Jewish and Christian themes

For about two thousand years a reserve of energy has fed and supported us, and filled our lives, but during the last century a split has opened in this reserve, and its components have begun to disintegrate: God, perspective, colour, the Bible, shape, line, traditions, the so-called humanities, love, devotion, family, school, education, the prophets and Christ himself Have I too, perhaps, doubted in my time? I painted pictures upside down, decapitated people and dissected them, scattering the pieces in the air, all in the name of another perspective, another kind of picture composition and another formalism:29

He was also at pains to distance his work from a single Jewish focus At the opening of The Chagall Museum in Nice he said 'My painting represents not the dream of one people but of all humanity'

Stained glass windows:
One of Chagall's major contributions to art has been his work with stained glass This medium allowed him further to express his desire to create intense and fresh colors and had the added benefit of natural light and refraction interacting and constantly changing: everything from the position where the viewer stood to the weather outside would alter the visual effect (though this is not the case with his Hadassah windows) It was not until 1956, when he was nearly 70 years of age, that he designed windows for the church at Assy, his first major project Then, from 1958 to 1960, he created windows for Metz Cathedral

Jerusalem Windows (1962):
In 1960, he began creating stained glass windows for the synagogue of Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem Leymarie writes that "in order to illuminate the synagogue both spiritually and physically", it was decided that the twelve windows, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, were to be filled with stained glass Chagall envisaged the synagogue as "a crown offered to the Jewish Queen", and the windows as "jewels of translucent fire", she writes Chagall then devoted the next two years to the task, and upon completion in 1961 the windows were exhibited in Paris and then the Museum of Modern Art in New York They were installed permanently in Jerusalem in February 1962 Each of the twelve windows is approximately ll feet high and 8 feet (24 m) wide, much larger than anything he had done before Cogniat considers them to be "his greatest work in the field of stained glass", although Virginia Haggard McNeil records Chagall's disappointment that they were to be lit with artificial light, and so would not change according to the conditions of natural light

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard commented that "Chagall reads the Bible and suddenly the passages become light":xii In 1973 Israel released a 12-stamp set with images of the stained-glass windows

The windows symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel who were blessed by Jacob and Moses in the verses which conclude Genesis and Deuteronomy In those books, notes Leymarie, "The dying Moses repeated Jacob's solemn act and, in a somewhat different order, also blessed the twelve tribes of Israel who were about to enter the land of Canaan In the synagogue, where the windows are distributed in the same way, the tribes form a symbolic guard of honor around the tabernacle":xii Leymarie describes the physical and spiritual significance of the windows:

The essence of the Jerusalem Windows lies in color, in Chagall's magical ability to animate material and transform it into light Words do not have the power to describe Chagall's color, its spirituality, its singing quality, its dazzling luminosity, its ever more subtle flow, and its sensitivity to the inflections of the soul and the transports of the imagination It is simultaneously jewel-hard and foamy, reverberating and penetrating, radiating light from an unknown interior:xii

At the dedication ceremony in 1962, Chagall described his feelings about the windows:

For me a stained glass window is a transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world Stained glass has to be serious and passionate It is something elevating and exhilarating It has to live through the perception of light To read the Bible is to perceive a certain light, and the window has to make this obvious through its simplicity and grace The thoughts have nested in me for many years, since the time when my feet walked on the Holy Land, when I prepared myself to create engravings of the Bible They strengthened me and encouraged me to bring my modest gift to the Jewish people—that people that lived here thousands of years ago, among the other Semitic peoples:145–146

United Nations building (1964):
In 1964 Chagall created a stained-glass window, entitled Peace, for the UN in honor of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN's second secretary general who was killed in an airplane crash in Africa in 1961 The window is about 15 feet (46 m) wide and 12 feet (37 m) high and contains symbols of peace and love along with musical symbols In 1967 he dedicated a stained-glass window to John D Rockefeller in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York

Fraumünster in Zurich, Switzerland (1967):
The Fraumünster cathedral in Zurich, Switzerland, founded in 853, is known for its five large stained glass windows created by Chagall in 1967 Each window is 32 feet (98 m) tall by 3 feet (091 m) wide Religion historian James H Charlesworth notes that it is "surprising how Christian symbols are featured in the works of an artist who comes from a strict and Orthodox Jewish background" He surmises that Chagall, as a result of his Russian background, often used Russian icons in his paintings, with their interpretations of Christian symbols He explains that his chosen themes were usually derived from biblical stories, and frequently portrayed the "obedience and suffering of God's chosen people" One of the panels depicts Moses receiving the Torah, with rays of light from his head At the top of another panel is a depiction of Jesus' crucifixion

St Stephan's church in Mainz, Germany (1978):
In 1978 he began creating windows for St Stephan's church in Mainz, Germany Today, 200,000 visitors a year visit the church, and "tourists from the whole world pilgrim up St Stephan's Mount, to see the glowing blue stained glass windows by the artist Marc Chagall", states the city's web site "St Stephan's is the only German church for which the Chagall has created windows"

The website also notes, "The colours address our vital consciousness directly, because they tell of optimism, hope and delight in life", says Monsignor Klaus Mayer, who imparts Chagall's work in mediations and books He corresponded with Chagall during 1973, and succeeded in persuading the "master of colour and the biblical message" to create a sign for Jewish-Christian attachment and international understanding Centuries earlier Mainz had been "the capital of European Jewry", and contained the largest Jewish community in Europe, notes historian John Man:16 In 1978, at the age of 91, Chagall created the first window and eight more followed Chagall's collaborator Charles Marq complemented Chagall's work by adding several stained glass windows using the typical colours of Chagall

All Saints' Church, Tudeley, UK (1963–1978):
All Saints' Church, Tudeley is the only church in the world to have all its twelve windows decorated by Chagall The other two religious buildings with complete sets of Chagall windows are the Hadassah Medical Center synagogue, and the Chapel of Le Saillant, Limousin

The windows at Tudeley were commissioned by Sir Henry and Lady Rosemary d'Avigdor-Goldsmid as a memorial tribute to their daughter Sarah, who died in 1963 aged 21 in a sailing accident off Rye When Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, and saw the church for the first time, he exclaimed "C'est magnifique! Je les ferai tous!" ("It's beautiful! I will do them all!") Over the next ten years Chagall designed the remaining eleven windows, made again in collaboration with the glassworker Charles Marq in his workshop at Reims in northern France The last windows were installed in 1985, just before Chagall's death

Chichester Cathedral, West Sussex, UK:
On the north side of Chichester Cathedral there is a stained glass window designed and created by Chagall at the age of 90 The window, his last commissioned work, was inspired by Psalm 150; 'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord' at the suggestion of Dean Walter Hussey The window was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in 1978

Murals, theatre sets and costumes:
Chagall first worked on stage designs in 1914 while living in Russia, under the inspiration of the theatrical designer and artist Léon Bakst It was during this period in the Russian theatre that formerly static ideas of stage design were, according to Cogniat, "being swept away in favor of a wholly arbitrary sense of space with different dimensions, perspectives, colors and rhythms":66 These changes appealed to Chagall who had been experimenting with Cubism and wanted a way to enliven his images Designing murals and stage designs, Chagall's "dreams sprang to life and became an actual movement"

As a result, Chagall played an important role in Russian artistic life during that time and "was one of the most important forces in the current urge towards anti-realism" which helped the new Russia invent "astonishing" creations Many of his designs were done for the Jewish Theatre in Moscow which put on numerous Jewish plays by playwrights such as Gogol and Singe Chagall's set designs helped create illusory atmospheres which became the essence of the theatrical performances

After leaving Russia, twenty years passed before he was again offered a chance to design theatre sets In the years between, his paintings still included harlequins, clowns and acrobats, which Cogniat notes "convey his sentimental attachment to and nostalgia for the theatre" His first assignment designing sets after Russia was for the ballet "Aleko" in 1942, while living in America In 1945 he was also commissioned to design the sets and costumes for Stravinsky's Firebird These designs contributed greatly towards his enhanced reputation in America as a major artist and, as of 2013, are still in use by New York City Ballet

Cogniat describes how Chagall's designs "immerse the spectator in a luminous, colored fairy-land where forms are mistily defined and the spaces themselves seem animated with whirlwinds or explosions" His technique of using theatrical color in this way reached its peak when Chagall returned to Paris and designed the sets for Ravel's Daphnis and Chloë in 1958

In 1964 he repainted the ceiling of the Paris Opera using 2,400 square feet (220 m2) of canvas He painted two monumental murals which hang on opposite sides of the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in New York which opened in 1966 The pieces, The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music, which hang from the top-most balcony level and extend down to the Grand Tier lobby level, were completed in France and shipped to New York, and are covered by a system of panels during the hours in which the opera house receives direct sunlight to prevent fading He also designed the sets and costumes for a new production of Die Zauberflöte for the company which opened in February 1967 and was used through the 1981/1982 season

Tapestries:
Chagall also designed tapestries which were woven under the direction of Yvette Cauquil-Prince, who also collaborated with Picasso These tapestries are much rarer than his paintings, with only 40 of them ever reaching the commercial market Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12 floor mosaics and a wall mosaic

Ceramics and sculpture:
Chagall began learning about ceramics and sculpture while living in south France Ceramics became a fashion in the Côte d'Azur with various workshops starting up at Antibes, Vence and Vallauris He took classes along with other known artists including Picasso and Fernand Léger At first Chagall painted existing pieces of pottery but soon expanded into designing his own, which began his work as a sculptor as a compliment to his painting

After experimenting with pottery and dishes he moved into large ceramic murals However, he was never satisfied with the limits imposed by the square tile segments which Cogniat notes "imposed on him a discipline which prevented the creation of a plastic image"

Exhibitions and tributes:
During his lifetime, Chagall received several honors:

In 1960, Brandeis University awarded Marc Chagall an honorary degree in Laws, at its 9th Commencement
In 1977, the city of Jerusalem bestowed upon him the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award
Also in 1977, the government of France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur
1963 documentary
Chagall, a short 1963 documentary, features Chagall It won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary

Postage stamp tributes
Because of the international acclaim he enjoyed and the popularity of his art, a number of countries have issued commemorative stamps in his honor depicting examples from his works In 1963 France issued a stamp of his painting, The Married Couple of the Eiffel Tower In 1969, Israel produced a stamp depicting his King David painting In 1973 Israel released a 12-stamp set with images of the stained-glass windows that he created for the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center Synagogue; each window was made to signify one of the "Twelve Tribes of Israel"

In 1987, as a tribute to recognize the centennial of his birth in Belarus, seven nations engaged in a special omnibus program and released postage stamps in his honor The countries which issued the stamps included Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, The Gambia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Grenada, which together produced 48 stamps and 10 souvenir sheets Although the stamps all portray his various masterpieces, the names of the artwork are not listed on the stamps

Exhibitions
There were also several major exhibitions of Chagall's work during his lifetime and following his death

In 1967, the Louvre in Paris exhibited 17 large-scale paintings and 38 gouaches, under the title of "Message Biblique", which he donated to the nation of France on condition that a museum was to be built for them in Nice:201 In 1969 work began on the museum, named Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall It was completed and inaugurated on 7 July 1973, on Chagall's birthday Today it contains monumental paintings on biblical themes, three stained-glass windows, tapestries, a large mosaic and numerous gouaches for the "Bible series":208
From 1969 to 1970, the Grand Palais in Paris held the largest Chagall exhibition to date, including 474 works The exhibition was called "Hommage a Marc Chagall", was opened by the French President and "proved an enormous success with the public and critics alike"
In 1973, he traveled to the Soviet Union, his first visit back since he left in 1922 The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow had a special exhibition for the occasion of his visit He was able to see again the murals he long ago made for the Jewish Theatre In St Petersburg, he was reunited with two of his sisters, whom he had not seen for more than 50 years
In 1982, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden organized a retrospective exhibition which later traveled to Denmark
In 1985, the Royal Academy in London presented a major retrospective which later traveled to Philadelphia Chagall was too old to attend the London opening and died a few months later
In 2003, a major retrospective of Chagall's career was organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, in conjunction with the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Nice, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
In 2007, an exhibition of his work titled "Chagall of Miracles", was held at Il Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome, Italy
The regional art museum in Novosibirsk had a Chagall exhibition on his biblical subjects between 16 June 2010 and 29 August 2010
The Musée d'art et d'histoire du judaïsme in Paris had a Chagall exhibition titled "Chagall and the Bible" in 2011
The Luxembourg Museum in Paris held a Chagall retrospective in 2013
The Jewish Museum in New York City has held multiple exhibitions on Chagall including the 2001 exhibit Marc Chagall: Early Works from Russian Collections and the exhibit 2013 Chagall: Love, War and Exhile
Current exhibitions and permanent displays
Chagall's work is housed in a variety of locations, including the 'Palais Garnier' (the Opera de Paris), the Art Institute of Chicago, Chase Tower Plaza of downtown Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, the Metz Cathedral, Notre-Dame de Reims, the Fraumünster abbey in Zürich, Switzerland, the Church of St Stephan in Mainz, Germany and the Biblical Message museum in Nice, France, which Chagall helped to design
The only church in the world with a complete set of Chagall window-glass is located in the tiny village of Tudeley, in Kent, England
Twelve stained-glass windows are part of Hadassah Hospital Ein Kerem in Jerusalem, Israel Each frame depicts a different tribe
In the United States, the Union Church of Pocantico Hills contains a set of Chagall windows commemorating the prophets, which was commissioned by John D Rockefeller, Jr
The Lincoln Center in New York City, contains Chagall's huge murals; The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music are installed in the lobby of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which began operation in 1966 Also in New York, the United Nations Headquarters has a stained glass wall of his work In 1967 the UN commemorated this artwork with a postage stamp and souvenir sheet
The family home on Pokrovskaya Street, Vitebsk, is now the Marc Chagall Museum
The Museum of Biblical Art, Dallas, Texas has one of the largest collections of Chagall works on paper, hosting continuously holding rotating Chagall exhibitions
The Marc Chagall Yufuin Kinrin-ko Museum in Yufuin, Kyushu, Japan, holds about 40–50 of his works
Marc Chagall's late painting titled Job for the Job Tapestry in Chicago
Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, featuring pieces from Chagall's Bible series and more is on display now at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, Colorado This exhibit ends 11 January 2015
Musée des Beaux Arts (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) in Montreal Canada will be opening a Chagall exhibit on 28 January 2017 running until late June, with over 400 works on exhibit The exhibit will then travel to Los Angeles in July 2017
Other tributes
During the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a Chagall-like float with clouds and dancers passed by upside down hovering above 130 costumed dancers, 40 stilt-walkers and a violinist playing folk music
http://hisour.com/artist/marc-chagall/