Hello, my name is Paul Priestley.
Welcome to Artist in School, the home of art history for young people and interested amateurs.
Today we are going to look at the Russian artist, Marc Chagall.
Wonderful painter, the painter of love.
Once described as a ‘poet with the wings of a painter’ Marc Chagall often said he
preferred the company of poets to that of painters.
He disliked art theories and the restrictions of art movements, so he never became a surrealist
or a cubist painter.
As you’ll see in his paintings, the central theme of Chagall’s work is love, simple
as that.
As the artist himself said, ‘In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one
single colour that gives meaning to life and art, the colour of love.’
Marc Chagall, an orthodox Jew, was born in Vitebsk, Russia on the 7th of July 1887 as
Moshe Segal.
He was the eldest of 9 children.
His father worked for a fish merchant, his mother ran a grocery shop and rented out small
wooden huts built onto the side of the family house for extra income.
As a boy he attended the Jewish primary school and the Municipal School in Vitebsk.
Later in life he described Vitebsk as ‘a strange town, an unhappy town, a boring town,’
yet it features in many of his paintings.
At the age of 18 Chagall started at the art school of the painter Yehuda Pen, but he left
after 2 months to work as a re-toucher for a Vitebsk photographer.
Later, in 1907 Chagall moved, without a permit, to Saint Petersburg to take up an apprenticeship
as a sign writer.
He lived there in great poverty, but soon joined the painting school of the Imperial
Society for the Promotion of the Arts.
1909 brought yet another move, when Chagall joined the more liberal Svanseva Art school.
Here he studied with Leon Bakst - the Russian painter, who revolutionised theatrical costume
and set design.
Bakst introduced Chagall to more modern approaches of artistic expression, and crucially, taught
him to use colour as a basic element of his work.
Despite spending time studying, Chagall still found time to visit his family in Vitebsk.
On one memorable visit he met Bella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy jeweller who, 6
years later, would become his wife.
After receiving a grant in 1910 Chagall moved to Paris, where he changed his name to the
more French sounding Marc Chagall and in 1911 moved into his own studio in La Ruche, the
legendary Parisian artist colony.
It was here he became friends with the artists Ferdinand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani and Chiam
Soutine.
The following year Chagall exhibited 3 paintings at the Salon des Independents in Paris; The
first is a painting called ‘The Drunkard’ – note the reverse perspective, the flattened
and disjointed objects and clashing complementary colours.
The second painting, ‘Dedicated to my Fiancé’ was based very much around his Jewish- Russian
background and of course Bella.
The third painting was, ‘Russia, Asses and Others’ – notice how the contrast between
the real and the unreal causes reality to appear miraculous, or even dreamlike.
Later in 1914 Chagall held his first one man exhibition in the Berlin Gallery, Der Sturm.
Later that year he got a 3 month visa to visit Russia, but couldn’t return to Paris because
of the outbreak of the First World War.
On 25th of July 1915 Chagall married Bella Rosenfelt in Vitebsk.
Shortly afterwards they moved to Saint Petersburg, where Chagall worked as a Clerk in the Press
Department for the War Economy Office, in lieu of military service.
Chagall exhibited, in 1916, 45 paintings at the exhibition of the Avant Garde artists
group, the Jack of Diamonds in Moscow.
Following the October Revolution of 1917, he was offered the post of Head of Fine Arts
in the newly created Ministry of Culture, but he declined the appointment and returned
with Bella and his daughter, to Vitebsk.
By 1919 Chagall had set up the Vitebsk School of Fine Arts with artists Kazimir Malevich
and El Lissitzky as part of the teaching team.
But things didn’t go well and after numerous arguments about artistic direction, Chagall
upped and left.
Shortly afterwards, Malevich renamed the Art School the Suprematist Academy.
The abstraction of Suprematist was not something that appealed to Chagall.
Two years later, in 1922, Chagall left Russia for good.
He lived in Berlin for a few months, before moving on to Paris.
He returned to his old studio in la Ruche, but all the paintings he had left before the
War had disappeared.
He hated the fact that part of his personal history, which the paintings represented,
had gone, so for most of the next 3 years he painted replicas and new versions.
During these years he also received a number of commissions including one for 19 gouaches
on the theme of the circus.
His reputation was growing.
So much so that in 1931 he received an invitation from the mayor of Tel Aviv to spend time in
Palestine.
Chagall spent 3 months there with his wife and daughter Ida.
The country and its history inspired him to start a series of etchings on a Biblical theme,
but the project was not completed and published until 1956.
But by 1933 life for Jews, particularly in Germany, was becoming increasingly difficult.
Later that year a number of Chagall’s paintings were publicly burnt by the Nazis, outside
of the Mannheim Art Gallery’s exhibition on Cultural Bolshevism.
During the next couple of years, Chagall managed to visit Poland and Italy, but pressure on
Jews in Europe was increasing.
In 1937, on the orders of the Nazi regime, all Chagall’s works were removed from German
museums.
Three of these paintings were shown in the notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition alongside
other confiscated art works by internationally famous artists.
1938 saw Chagall became a French citizen.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Chagall moved his family to the relative
safety of the South of France.
The following year Varian Fry, the director of the American Emergency Rescue Committee
visited Chagall in France.
He brought with him an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art in New York for Chagall
and his family to come to the United States.
Shortly afterwards, the Chagall’s moved to Marseilles before setting sail for the
United States.
On the 23rd of June 1941, the same day Germany invaded Russia, Chagall and his family arrived
in New York.
In New York Chagall met a number of exiled artists including, Piet Mondrian and the art
dealer, Pierre Matisse, the son of artist Henri Matisse.
Pierre Matisse, organised Chagall’s first exhibition in America, in New York November
1941, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
In 1944 Chagall’s wife Bella fell ill with a viral infection.
She was taken to a small local hospital that lacked the facilities and expertise to treat
her.
Bella died just 36 hours after her arrival.
Chagall was heartbroken.
Chagall painted nothing for next 6 months.
Ida, Chagall’s daughter, was so worried about how lonely and morose Chagall had become,
she employed a housekeeper, a young English woman named Virginia Haggard to look after
him.
She was 28 years his junior and spoke French.
She tidied his rooms, cooked and brought him flowers to paint.
Eventually, she became his companion and later his lover.
The relationship lasted until 1951.
In the late 1940’s a number of retrospective exhibitions were held of Chagall’s work
with shows in New York, London, Zurich and Bern in Switzerland.
They were all hugely successful.
But Chagall longed to return to France, and in 1948 he left America for good.
Although he was now internationally famous, his childhood timidity had never left him.
Chagall avoided the limelight, and wasn’t really interested in fame.
In 1950 he moved to Vence in the South of France and intermittently met up with Matisse
and Picasso both of whom had studios nearby.
His relationship with Pablo Picasso was problematic, at times he was a friend other times very
much a rival.
Chagall could be quite cynical, once joking, “What a genius, that Picasso, it’s a pity
he doesn’t paint.”
Picasso could be equally scathing although he did once say of Chagall, “I don’t know
where he gets those images . . . . He must have an angel in his head.”
In 1951 Virginia left him, but the following year Chagall met Valentina Brodsky who he
married on 12th of July.
Their marriage gave him new energy and in June of that year he visited Chartres Cathedral
to study medieval stained glass window painting.
The new medium inspired him and in 1959 he created stained glass windows for the north
apse of Metz Cathedral in France.
The following year he was commissioned to create windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew
University Clinic in Jerusalem.
Shortly after their completion, together with the painter Oscar Kokoschka, he was awarded
the Erasmus Prize of the European Culture Foundation in Copenhagen.
1964 saw Chagall complete the windows of the Good Samaritan for the memorial to John D
Rockefeller Junior and the Peace window for the United Nations building in New York.
Chagall travelled to Jerusalem in 1969 to take part in the inauguration of the new building
for the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for which he created the floor and wall mosaics.
In 1970, 50 years after he left Russia, Chagall travelled with his wife to Moscow and Leningrad
at the invitation of the Soviet cultural minister.
He was reunited with his two sisters, who he had not seen for fifty years, but refused
to go back to the Vitebsk.
During 1975 Chagall produced 50 lithographs illustrating Shakespeare's The Tempest and
also produced several large canvases with mythological biblical themes.
Two years later, at the age of 90 Chagall was awarded France’s highest honour, the
Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour.
During the following years, Chagall completed stain glassed windows for St. Stephen's Church
in Mainz and the American Windows for The Art Institute in Chicago.
In 1977 the French president opened an exhibition of Chagall’s work in the Louvre in Paris,
the first time a living artist had received the honour.
Marc Chagall died at his home in St Paul de Vence at the age of 97, on the 28th of March
1985.
He was a complex man, sometimes naive sometimes sophisticated, shy and brazen, simple and
shrewd, and could be stingy but also very generous.
He wanted to be regarded as a universal painter not just a Jewish artist.
However, some critics accused him of repeating himself, possibly for financial reasons.
But as Chagall himself said, ‘Poets always use the same letters, but out of them they
constantly recreate different words.’
Thank you for watching, I hope you have really enjoyed learning about Marc Chagall, a wonderful
artist.
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