| Facts/Data
|
Birth
1887 (Vitebsk, Russia)
Death
1985 (St. Paul de Vence, France)
Lived/Active
New York / France/Russian Federation
Self portrait
Often Known For
village peasant theme paintings-abstraction, public art
Discussion Board
Would you like to discuss this artist?
AskART Discussion Boards
(33 Active)
|
|
 |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Marc Chagall was a man of keen intelligence, a shrewd observer of the contemporary scene, with a great sympathy for human suffering. He was born on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia; his original name was Moishe Shagal (Segal), but when he became a foremost member of the Ecole de Paris, he adopted French citizenship and the French spelling of his name. Vitebsk was a good-sized Russian town of over 60,000, not a shtetl. His father supported a wife and eight children as a worker in a herring-pickling plant.
Sheltered by the Jewish commandment against graven images, the young Chagall never saw so much as a drawing until, one day, he watched a schoolmate copying a magazine illustration. He was ridiculed for his astonishment, but he began copying and improvising from magazines. Both Chagall's parents reluctantly agreed to let him study with Yehuda Pen, a Jewish artist in Vitebsk. Later, in 1906, they allowed their son to study in St. Petersburg, where he was exposed to Russian Iconography and folk art. At that time, Jews could leave the Pale only for business and employment and were required to carry a permit. Chagall, who was in St. Petersburg without a permit, was imprisoned briefly.
His first wife, Bella Rosenfeld, was a product of a rich cultivated and intellectual group of Jews in Vitebsk. Chagall was made commissar for the arts for the area, charged with directing its cultural life and establishing an art school. Russian folklore, peasant life and landscapes persisted in his work all his life. In 1910 a rich patron, a lawyer named Vinaver, staked him to a crucial trip to Paris, where young artists were revolutionizing art. He also sent him a handsome allowance of 125 francs (in those days about $24) each month. Chagall rejected cubism, fauvism and futurism, but remained in Paris. He found a studio near Montparnasse in a famous twelve-sided wooden structure divided into wedge-shaped rooms. Chaim Soutine, a fellow Russian Jew, and Modigliani lived on the same floor. To Chagall's astonishment, he found himself heralded as one of the fathers of surrealism. In 1923, a delegation of Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and Gala (later Salvador Dali's wife) actually knelt before Chagall, begging him to join their ranks. He refused.
To understand Chagall's work, it is necessary to know that he was born a Hasidic Jew, heir to mysticism and a world of the spirit, steeped in Jewish lore and reared in the Yiddish language. The Hasidim had a special feeling for animals, which they tried not to overburden. In the mysterious world of Kabbala and fantastic ancient legends of Chagall's youth, the imaginary was as important as the real. His extraordinary use of color also grew out of his dream world; he did not use color realistically, but for emotional effect and to serve the needs of his design. Most of his favorite themes, though superficially light and trivial, mask dark and somber thoughts. The circus he views as a mirror of life; the crucifixion as a tragic theme, used as a parallel to the historic Jewish condition, but he is perhaps best known for the rapturous lovers he painted all his life. His love of music is a theme that runs through his paintings.
After a brief period in Berlin, Chagall, Bella and their young daughter, Ida, moved to Paris and in 1937 they assumed French citizenship. When France fell, Chagall accepted an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art to immigrate to the United States. He was arrested and imprisoned in Marseilles for a short time, but was still able to immigrate with his family. The Nazi onslaught caught Chagall in Vichy, France, preoccupied with his work. He was loath to leave; his friend Varian Fry rescued him from a police roundup of Jews in Marseille, and packed him, his family and 3500 lbs. of his art works on board a transatlantic ship. The day before he arrived in New York City, June 23, 1941, the Nazis attacked Russia. The United States provided a wartime haven and a climate of liberty for Chagall. In America he spent the war years designing large backdrops for the Ballet.
Bella died suddenly in the United States of a viral infection in September 1944 while summering in upstate New York. He rushed her to a hospital in the Adirondacks, where, hampered by his fragmentary English, they were turned away with the excuse that the hour was too late. The next day she died.
He waited for three years after the war before returning to France. With him went a slender married English girl, Virginia Haggard MacNeil; Chagall fell in love with her and they had a son, David. After seven years she ran off with an indigent photographer. It was an immense blow to Chagall's ego, but soon after, he met Valentine Brodsky, a Russian divorcee designing millinery in London (he called her Fava). She cared for him during the days of his immense fame and glory. They returned to France, to a home and studio in rustic Vence. Chagall loved the country and every day walked through the orchards, terraces, etc. before he went to work.
Chagall died on March 28, 1985 in the south of France. His heirs negotiated an arrangement with the French state allowing them to pay most of their inheritance taxes in works of art. The heirs owed about $30 million to the French government; roughly $23 million of that amount was deemed payable in artworks. Chagall's daughter, Ida and his widow approved the arrangement.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources:
Hannah Grad Goodman in Homage to Chagall in Hadassah Magazine, June 1985
Jack Kroll in Newsweek, April 8, 1985
Andrea Jolles in National Jewish Monthly Magazine, May 1985
Michael Gibson in ARTnews, September 1988
Time Magazine, July 30, 1965
|
Biography from Rogallery.com:
|  Marc Chagall (7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-Belarusian-French painter of Jewish origin, who was born in Belarus, at that time part of the Russian Empire. He is associated with the modern movements after Impressionism.
Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal; his name was rendered in the Russian language as Mark Zakharovich Shagalov. Chagall was born in Liozno, near Vitebsk, Belarus, the eldest of nine children in the close-knit Jewish family led by his father Khatskl (Zakhar) Shagal, a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite. This period of his life, described as happy though impoverished, appears in references throughout Chagall's work. Currently the Shagal's house on Pokrovskaya Street in Vitebsk is restored as part of the Marc Chagall's Museum.
After he began studying painting in 1906 under famed local artist Yehuda Pen, Chagall moved to St. Petersburg some months later, in 1907. There he joined the school of the "Society of Art Supporters" and studied under Nikolai Roerich, encountering artists of every school and style. From 1908-1910, Chagall studied under Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting.
This was a difficult period for Chagall; at the time, Jewish residents were only allowed to live in St. Petersburg with a permit, and the artist was jailed for a brief period for an infringement of this restriction. Despite this, Chagall remained in St. Petersburg until 1910, and regularly visited his home town where, in 1909, he met his future wife, Bella Rosenfeld.
After gaining a reputation as an artist, Chagall left St. Petersburg to settle in Paris to be near the burgeoning art community in the Montparnasse district, where he developed friendships with such avant-garde luminaries as Guillaume Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, and Fernand Léger. In 1914, he returned to Vitebsk and, a year later, married his fiancée, Bella. While in Russia, World War I erupted and, in 1916, the Chagalls had their first child, a daughter they named Ida.
Chagall became an active participant in the Russian Revolution of 1917. Although the Soviet Ministry of Culture made him a Commissar of Art for the Vitebsk region, where he founded Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and an art school, he did not fare well politically under the Soviet system. He and his wife moved to Moscow in 1920 and then back to Paris three years later, in 1923. During this period, Chagall published his memoirs in Yiddish, which were originally written in Russian and translated into French by Bella. He also wrote articles, poetry and memoirs in Yiddish, published mainly in newspapers (and only posthumously in book-form). Chagall became a French citizen in 1937.
With the Nazi occupation of France during World War II and the deportation of Jews, the Chagalls fled Paris, seeking asylum at Villa Air-Bel in Marseille, where the American journalist Varian Fry assisted in their escape from France through Spain and Portugal. In 1941, the Chagalls settled in the United States of America.
On September 2, 1944, Chagall's beloved Bella, the constant subject of his paintings and companion of his life, died from an illness. Two years later, in 1946, he returned to Europe. By 1949 he was working in Provence, in the South of France. That same year, Chagall took part in the creation of the MRAP anti-racist NGO.
The depression Chagall experienced following Bella's death was alleviated when he met Virginia Haggard, with whom he had a son, David (McNeil). At this time, Chagall received financial aid from theatrical commissions and, in his painting, rediscovered a free and vibrant use of color. His works of this period are dedicated to love and the joy of life, with curved, sinuous figures. He also began to work in sculpture, ceramics, and stained glass.
In 1950 he also began experimenting with graphic mediums. After meeting with Fernand Mourlot, he often visited Mourlot Studios where he eventually produced close to a thousand different lithographic editions. With the assistance of Charles Sorlier, a master printer working at Mourlot, he spent 30 years exploring the graphic medium that most lends itself to color representation. Charles Sorlier also became one of his closest friends, assistant and counsel until the day of his death.
Chagall remarried in 1952 to Valentina Brodsky (whom he called "Vava"). He traveled several times to Greece and in 1957 visited Israel. In 1960, he created stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem and, in 1966, wall art for the new parliament being constructed in that city.
During the Six Day War the hospital came under severe attack, placing Chagall's work under threat. In response to this, Chagall wrote a letter from France stating: "I am not worried about the windows, only about the safety of Israel. Let Israel be safe and I will make you lovelier windows." Luckily, most of the panels were removed in time, with only one sustaining severe damage. In 1973, Israel issued a series of stamps featuring the Chagall windows, which depict Twelve tribes, such as Levi, pictured here.
At the age of 97, Chagall died in Saint-Paul de Vence on the French Riviera on March 28, 1985 and was buried at the local cemetery. His plot is located in the most westerly aisle upon entering the cemetery. |
Biography from Artistic Gallery:
|  Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Byelorussia to a poor Hassidic family. The eldest of nine children, he studied first in a heder before moving to a secular Russian school, where he began to display his artistic talent. With his mother's support, and despite his father's disapproval, Chagall pursued his interest in art, going to St. Petersburg in 1907 to study art with Leon Bakst. Influenced by contemporary Russian painting, Chagall's distinctive, child-like style, often centering on images from his childhood, began to emerge.
From 1910 to 1914, Chagall lived in Paris, and there absorbed the works of the leading cubist, surrealist, and fauvist painters. It was during this period that Chagall painted some of his most famous paintings of the Jewish "shtetl" or village, and developed the features that became recognizable trademarks of his art. Strong and often bright colors portray the world with a dreamlike, non-realistic simplicity, and the fusion of fantasy, religion, and nostalgia infuses his work with a joyous quality. Animals, workmen, lovers, and musicians populate his figures; the "fiddler on the roof" recurs frequently, often hovering within another scene. Chagall's work of this period displays the influence of contemporary French painting, but his style remains independent of any one school of art. He exhibited regularly in the Salon des Independants.
In 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin, exhibiting work dominated by Jewish images and personages. During the war, he resided in Russia, and in 1917, endorsing the revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk and then director of the newly established Free Academy of Art. The Bolshevik authorities, however, frowned upon Chagall's style of art as too modern, and in 1922, Chagall left Russia, settling in France one year later. He lived there permanently except for the years 1941 - 1948 when, fleeing France during World War II, he resided in the United States. Chagall's horror over the Nazi rise to power is expressed in works depicting Jewish martyrs and Jewish refugees.
In addition to images of the Hassidic world, Chagall's paintings are inspired by themes from the Bible. His fascination with the Bible culminated in a series of over 100 etchings illustrating the Bible, many of which incorporate elements from Jewish folklore and from religious life in Vitebsk. Chagall's other illustrations include works by Gogol, La Fontaine, Y. L. Peretz, and his autobiographical Ma Vie (1931; My Life 1960) and Chagall by Chagall (1979).
Chagall painted with a variety of media, such as oils, water colors, and gouaches. His work also expanded to other forms of art, including ceramics, mosaics, and stained glass. Among his most famous building decorations are the ceiling of the Opera House in Paris, murals at the New York Metropolitan Opera, a glass window at the United Nations, and decorations at the Vatican.
Israel, which Chagall first visited in 1931 for the opening of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, is likewise endowed with some of Chagall's work, most notably the twelve stained glass windows at Hadassah Hospital and wall decorations at the Knesset.
Chagall received many prizes and much recognition for his work. He was also one of very few artists to exhibit work at the Louvre in their lifetime
|
Biography from Odon Wagner Gallery:
| “I whiled away my days at the Place de la Concorde or round the Jardin
du Luxembourg, plucking leaves and looking at Danton and Watteau. Oh!
If only, astride the stone chimera of Notre Dame, I could forge a
pathway across the heavens. Paris, to me you are a second Vitebsk!”
–Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall was born in Belarus, on the 7th of July 1887.
Although born in Belarus, he was also considered a French painter,
draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, ceramicist and
writer. A prolific artist, Chagall excelled in the European
tradition of subject painting and distinguished himself as an
expressive colourist. His work is noted for its consistent use of
folkloric imagery and its sweetness of colour.
Chagall went to St Petersburg in 1907 where he entered a minor art
school, at the same time working as a sign painter. Throughout
his work the foundations of Russian art and the sign painter's
technique were evident. Though he preferred to be known as a
Belarussian artist, following his exile from the Soviet Union in 1923,
Chagall was recognized as a major figure of the École de Paris,
especially in the later 1920s and the 1930s. He was associated
with the avant-garde circle of Delaunay, Modigliani, and Chaim Soutine.
His childlike figures and objects distorted in scale and often floating
upside down in space, influenced on the surrealists.
During World War II Chagall lived in the USA, where he designed
ballet sets and costumes and subsequently worked on mosaics and
tapestries for the Israeli Knesset building (1966). Other
achievements included the costumes and decor for Stravinsky's The Firebird (1945), stained-glass windows, and murals.
Marc Chagall returned to France after the war, and along with Picasso,
was the only painter to have an exhibition at the Louvre during his
lifetime. Chagall died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alpes-Maritimes,
on the 28th of March 1985.
The artist chose lithography as a print medium to explore his
mystical world of lovers, musicians and artists. Working directly on
the printing plate, Chagall’s spontaneity of brushstrokes, drawn lines,
and lush colour resulted in the some of the twentieth centuries most
highly sought after lithographs.
Literature:
Gauss, Ulrike, Ed. Marc Chagall: The Lithographs. The Sorlier Collection. A Catalogue Raisonné. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998. Pg. 278.
Sorlier, Charles. The Lithographs of Chagall: 1969-1973. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1974. Pgs. 58-59.
|
Biography from Annex Galleries:
| Marc Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia. From 1907 to 1910, he studied in Saint Petersburg, at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts and later with Léon Bakst. In 1910, he moved to Paris, where he associated with Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and encountered Fauvism and Cubism. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d'Automne in 1912. His first solo show was held in 1914 at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin.
Chagall visited Russia in 1914, and was prevented from returning to Paris by the outbreak of war. He settled in Vitebsk, where he was appointed Commissar for Art in 1918. He founded the Vitebsk Popular Art School and directed it until disagreements with the Suprematists resulted in his resignation in 1920. He moved to Moscow and executed his first stage designs for the State Jewish Chamber Theater there. After a sojourn in Berlin, Chagall returned to Paris in 1923 and met Ambroise Vollard. His first retrospective took place in 1924 at the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert, Paris. During the 1930s, he traveled to Palestine, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and Italy. In 1933, the Kunsthalle Basel held a major retrospective of his work.
During World War II, Chagall fled to the United States. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave him a retrospective in 1946. He settled permanently in France in 1948 and exhibited in Paris, Amsterdam, and London. During 1951, he visited Israel and executed his first sculptures. The following year, the artist traveled in Greece and Italy.
During the 1960s, Chagall continued to travel widely, often in association with large-scale commissions he received. Among these were windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, installed in 1962; a ceiling for the Paris Opéra, installed in 1964; a window for the United Nations building, New York, installed in 1964; murals for the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, installed in 1967; and windows for the cathedral in Metz, France, installed in 1968. An exhibition of the artist's work from 1967 to 1977 was held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 1977-78, and a major retrospective was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1985.
Chagall died March 28, 1985, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.
Source:
Gauss, "Marc Chagall: The Lithographs", Verlag Gerd Hatja, New York, 1999 |
| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|