Chagall, another French artist, associated with several key art movements was one of the most successful artists of the past century. He created unique works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall even earned great respect from Pablo Picasso. However his life was full of unexpected turns, rocks and his guardian angel was quite busy making sure he survive in this bumpy ride. 🙂
Marc Chagall (Russian: Марк Захарович Шагал), born as Moishe Shagal, in 1887 near the city of Vitebsk in today’s Belarus (then part of the Russian Empire). His father worked for herring merchant carrying heavy barrels all day long for only 20 rubles (55 francs) a month. His mom was selling groceries from their home.
During that time Jewish children were discriminated and not allowed to attend regular Russian schools or universities. Jewish were also restricted with movements within towns and cities. The only alternative was the local Jewish religious school where Chagall received his primary education studying Hebrew and the Bible.
He could probably become laborer like his father or sell groceries like his mother if his mom didn’t decide to put him through a Russian high school. The only problem was that they weren’t taking Jews. Chagall’s courageous mother then bribed the school headmaster and at age 13 Chagall was accepted. It is ironic that 50 rubles (137 francs) opened the road to success for Chagall. The starting point in his artistic life was the moment when he first noticed a fellow student drawing. Chagall would later say how there was no art of any kind in his family’s home and the concept was totally foreign to him, but attracted him as magnet.
Eventually Chagall confided to his mother, that he want to be a painter”, although she could not understand his sudden interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that seemed so impractical. She did not have any money to offer but gave him her moral support and approval. Soon Chagall was visiting the studio of local realist artist Yury Pen who also ran a small drawing school in Vitebsk. Chagall was accepted for free due to his financial hardship.However, after only a few months at the school, Chagall found that academic portrait painting is not suitable for his desires.
In 1906, he moved to the capital Saint Petersburg which then was the center of the country’s artistic life with its famous art schools. But Jews were not permitted into the city without an internal passport, so Chagall has managed to get a temporary passport from a friend. He enrolled in a prestigious art school and studied there for two years. By 1907 he had begun painting naturalistic self-portraits and landscapes. During this time he also discovered experimental theater and the work of such artists as Paul Gauguin. Chagall often visited Vitebsk where he met and fall in love with his future wife Bella Rosenfeld.
To avoid the discrimination in Russian society during this time Jews had only two basic ways to join the art world: either to hide or deny their Jewish roots by avoiding public expressions of Jewishness or as Chagall chose to cherish and publicly express his Jewish roots and incorporate them into his art.
In 1910 driven by his dream of Paris, the city of light and freedom, Chagall moved to France where he hoped to develop his own artistic style. His first days were not easy, 23-year-old Chagall found himself alone in the big city and unable to speak French. At this time Cubism was the dominant art form and French art was still dominated by the material outlook of the 19th century. Eventually Chagall’s gift for pure color and feeling for simple poetry combined with a fresh unashamed sense of humor surprisingly resulted in his first recognition not from other painters but from poets.
In Paris he enrolled at the art academy La Palette where he studied under Andre Dunoyer De Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier. He made a living by working in another academy. In his free time Chagall was visiting art places: salons and galleries including Louvre where he studied masters like Rembrandt, van Gogh, Gauguin, Renoir, Matisse, Manet, Monet and others. He was also regular at Montmartre and the Latin Quarter and learned the technique of gouache.
While Chagall was happy just to breed the air in Paris he missed Vitebsk and even more his fiancé Bella. Two years after he arrived in France he accepted an invitation from a reputable art dealer in Berlin and left Paris with some 40 paintings and over hundred gouaches. The exhibit in Germany was a huge success but Chagall was anxious to see Bella so he continued on to Vitebsk. He planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella, but just few weeks later something unexpected forced him to change his plans. The First World War broke out, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period. A year later Chagall married Bella Rosenfeld and later their first child Ida was born.
Then in 1917 the October revolution came and while it was dangerous time for Chagall it also offered him a unique opportunity. Who would think that once segregated a Jew artist will become one of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde. Chagall enjoyed special privileges and prestige. He was even offered a prestigious position as a commissar of visual arts for the country but instead took a position as commissar of arts for Vitebsk. He then found the Vitebsk Arts College which later became the most distinguished school of art in the entire Soviet Union. Chagall’s idea was to attract one of the most important and independently minded artists in the country to teach at the school. Few months later Chagall left for Moscow after a clash with some key faculty members who preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles and rejected Chagall’s attempts as creating “bourgeois individualism” in their teachings.
In Moscow he was offered a position as stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. For its opening he created a number of large background murals using techniques he learned from his early teacher. One of the key murals was 9 feet (2.7 m) tall by 24 feet (7.3 m) long and included images of various lively subjects such as dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. Critics love the mural and one critic at the time called it “Hebrew jazz in paint.” Some of Chagall’s later large-scale works included murals for the Paris Opera and New York Metropolitan Opera.
Moscow is where Chagall first began exhibiting his work at a well-known salon and later on in St. Petersburg. He again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists. This constant exposure caused his name to spread and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. Chagall had turned thirty and had begun to make a name for himself.
The World War I ended in 1918 but the life quickly became a hardship for Russians as famine spread. Chagall moved to a smaller, less expensive, town near Moscow, despite the everyday crowded train commute to Moscow. Between 1921 and 1922 Chagall lived in primitive conditions and he decided to move back to France so that his art could grow in an atmosphere of greater freedom. Indeed the lack of freedom not the poor life conditions was the main driver behind his desire to go back to France. Chagall was not alone, numerous other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to move to the West. Chagall applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography “My Life”.
In 1923 Chagall finally was given permission by Soviets to leave Moscow and to return to France. On his way back he stopped in Berlin to recover the many paintings he had left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the World War I began, only to find that everything was either destroyed or lost. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings.
(To be continued)
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