Marc Chagall: life and works

Marc Chagall (born Moishe Shagal; 6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French player of Belarusian Jewish origin. An in front modernist, he was joined with several major artistic styles and created works in a broad range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as “the quintessential Jewish performer of the twentieth century” (though Chagall proverb his function as “not the aim of one people but of all humanity”). 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 along with been established as the world’s pre-eminent Jewish artist”. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He as a consequence did large-scale paintings, including allowance of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.

Before World War I, he travelled amid Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this epoch he created his own fusion and style of forward looking art based upon his idea of Eastern Europe and Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before neglect again for Paris in 1923.

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a opportunist of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism’s “golden age” in Paris, where “he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the pretend to have of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism”. Yet throughout these phases of his style “he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose behave was one long dreamy reverie of sparkle in his indigenous village of Vitebsk.” “When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the abandoned painter left who understands what colour in reality is”.