Marc Chagall (born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal) was born on July 7, 1887 near Vitebsk, Belarus to a poor Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family. Chagall was the eldest of nine children. His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home.
Chagall received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible. At the age of 13, his mother tried to enroll him in a Russian high school. She offered the headmaster 50 rubles to let him attend, which he accepted.
In 1907 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he attended the school of the imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts. Between 1908 and 1910, Chagall was a student of Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. These were years of hardship and poverty for Chagall. As a Jew, he was forced to dwell outside the city.
In 1960 Brandeis University awarded Marc Chagall an honorary degree in Laws.
Thanks to assistance from a patron, he was able to move to Paris in 1910, and soon found his place in what was then the artistic capital of the world. From 1910 to 1914 he lived there and worked for Russian-Jewish lawyer Maxim Vinaver. Many of his works at that time show the influence of Cubism and Fauvism although he could never be pigeonholed as belonging to a particular school. The avant-garde poets Blaise Cendrars, Max Jacob, and Guillaume Apollinaire and the painters Roger de La Fresnaye, Robert Delaunay, and Amedeo Modigliani became his friends.
Der Sturm gallery in Berlin held a one-man exhibition of his works in 1914. Chagall visited Berlin, where there were over 200 of his pictures that he was destined never to retrieve. He then went on to Vitebsk, where he was caught by the outbreak of World War I. For a time he was drafted into military service and stationed in Saint Petersburg.
After World War I and the Revolution of 1917 he was appointed commissar of fine arts in Vitebsk and director of the Vitebsk Art Academy. He also started a museum. In the first official exhibition of the new government, two rooms were reserved for Chagall’s work and the state purchased twelve of his paintings. However, he had been displaced as director after conflict with the Soviet authorities and his colleague Malevich, and his Free Academy had been turned into a Supremacist school. He and his family moved to Moscow and never returned to Vitebsk. In Moscow Chagall worked as a stage designer and also ran an art school for a short time. He also taught in a settlement for war orphans. It was at this period that he began to write his autobiography, published as "My Life".
In 1922 Chagall left Russia for Berlin, where he studied etching with Hermann Struck, but was unable to settle down because of the difficult economic situation, thus in 1923 he went to Paris. He worked on etchings for Gogol’s Dead Souls in 1923, La Fontaine’s Fables in 1927, circus scenes, and pictures influenced by the light and colors of southern France.
Chagall visited Palestine with his family in 1931 for the opening of the new Tel Aviv Museum and toured Egypt and Syria. The results of this journey were 105 biblical etchings, which have been called some of the finest masterpieces of the art of etching. He was profoundly affected by the anti-Semitic developments of the 1930s.
After the fall of France in 1940, it was not safe for Chagall to remain there, and the following year he arrived in New York. Americans were charmed with Chagall’s work.
In 1947 he again returned to France, and started his series of lithographs "Arabian Nights". Chagall lived first in Paris, then at Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, eventually establishing his home at Vence, near Nice.
Marc Chagall began at this stage to turn to new media and to experiment. He began working in ceramics in 1950 and made his first sculptures the following year. His famous "Paris" series, a sequence of fantastic scenes set against the background of views of the city, was created between 1953 and 1956. He also did major work in stained glass, designing the Twelve Tribes of Israel for Hadassah Hospital, Jerusalem, the Peace Window for the U.N. Secretariat, New York, and windows for the Vatican and for the cathedral of Metz. Although the designs were rendered by skilled craftsmen, Chagall worked closely with them and always did the grisaille. He designed three Gobelin tapestries for the Israeli Knesset (parliament) and a mosaic floor for its state reception hall.
Chagall painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera and two large murals for New York’s Lincoln Center. The National Museum of the Biblical Message of Marc Chagall opened in Nice in 1973, with many of his works - paintings, stained-glass windows, and a mosaic - on biblical themes. In 1977 the Louvre exhibited 62 of his paintings, an extremely rare event for a living artist. In 1981 after sixty years' absence, he was able to visit Moscow for an exhibition of his work at the Tretyakov Gallery.
He died on March 28, 1985, at the age of 97, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.
Marc Chagall was one of the most popular major innovators of the 20th-century School of Paris and also acclaimed as a forerunner of surrealism.
Chagall was awarded the Carnegie Prize third prize in 1939 for "Les Fiancés".
In 1977 the city of Jerusalem bestowed upon him the Yakir Yerushalayim (Worthy Citizen of Jerusalem) award. In 1977 he was given an exhibition at the Louvre, the first ever for a living artist, and received the grand cross of the Legion of Honor (Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur). Besides, he represented France in the Venice Biennale, receiving a prize for the graphic arts. In 1981 he won Wolf Prize.
Moreover, Chagall was honored with several important exhibitions including a retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art and the opening show of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
According to Chagall scholar Susan Tumarkin Goodman, Chagall himself was born of a family steeped in religious life. His parents were observant Hasidic Jews who found spiritual satisfaction in a life defined by their faith and organized by prayer.
Besides, Chagall therefore received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school.
However, Marc 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.
Chagall said that the October Revolution of 1917 and the new regime had turned Russia "upside down the way I turn my pictures". By then he was one of Russia's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special privileges and prestige as the "aesthetic arm of the revolution". He was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the country, but preferred something less political, and instead accepted a job as commissar of arts for Vitebsk.
Quotations:
"If I weren't a Jew (in the sense in which I use the word) then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now."
"..In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others."
"I know I must live in France, but I don't want to cut myself off from America. France is a picture already painted. America still has to be painted. Maybe that's why I feel freer there. But when I work in America, it's like shouting in a forest. There's no echo."
"If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste."
Marc Chagall was a member of the modernist avant-garde. He was also an active member of the irregular freemasonic lodge, the Grand Orient of Russia’s Peoples. He belonged to the "Vitebsk" lodge.
Moreover, in 1974 Chagall became a member of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.
Chagall's personality was paradoxical. He was an introvert who delighted in the world. He was a dreamer and a manipulator. He was instinctively selfish, yet lavishly kind with his eye.
Physical Characteristics: Bella Chagall, his first wife, in the description of their first encounter in Vitebsk said: "When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes...long, almond-shaped...and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat."
Quotes from others about the person
Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s: "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is."
Pablo Picasso: "I don't know where he [Marc Chagall] gets those images; he must have an angel in his head."
André Breton: "Under his [Chagall's] sole impulse metaphor [comparison of images] made its triumphal entry into modern painting."
Jean-Michel Foray, director of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message Museum in Nice: "Some art historians have sought to decrypt his symbols, but there's no consensus on what they mean. We cannot interpret them because they are simply part of his world, like figures from a dream."
Bella Rosenfeld became his first wife in 1915, and they had their first child, Ida. Before the marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support her, thus becoming a successful artist became a goal and inspiration. Bella acted as the model for his famous series of paintings that depict passionate flying figures. She died in 1944.
To distract him, 28-year-old daughter Ida took home a beautiful housekeeper Virginia Haggard, who was married to a certain McNeil. Chagall could not help but appreciate the refined beauty of a young woman. She soon became Chagall’s lover and in 1946 they had a son David. Since Virginia at that time was not divorced, the boy got the family name of his Scottish stepfather. Chagall was deeply hurt after breaking with Virginia, he even wanted to kill himself again.
In July 1952 he married Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background, who had run a successful millinery business in London. Though six years later, when there was conflict between Ida and Vava, Marc and Vava divorced and immediately remarried under an agreement more favourable to Vava. The marriage was, apparently, happy: Chagall had lived with Valentina for three decades and during this period his work had become extremely fruitful.
Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal was employed by a herring merchant.
Feige-Ite Shagal sold groceries from their home.
Bella, his beloved wife, inspiration, and model, whom he had married in 1915, died in 1944.
Chagall's daughter Ida married art historian Franz Meyer in January 1952.
In 1906 Chagall had noticed the studio of Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a realist artist who also operated a small drawing school in Vitebsk. Due to Chagall's youth and lack of income, Pen offered to teach him free of charge. However, after a few months at the school, Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires.
Chagall was a student of Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting between 1908 and 1910.
Picasso had a great deal of respect for Chagal.
