Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
1887-1985
Marc Chagall, the celebrated Russian-born artist who translated childhood memories, references to Jewish traditions and spontaneous dreams into imaginary, dreamlike artworks, is one of the most important names in 20th century Modernism. Moving to Paris in 1910 where he remained for most of his life, Chagall produced whimsical, naive images that conveyed both emotional metaphors and supernatural, otherworldly visions. Combining features of Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism and Expressionism in unique figurations, his works demonstrate an extraordinary awareness of the emotional powers of colour. An artist whose practice cannot be pigeonholed, Chagall and his moving, ethereal figurations remain popular to this day.
The Russian-born painter, lithographer, etcher and designer of sculptures, stained glass, ceramics, mosaics and tapestries, Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk. His imaginary, dreamlike artworks, depicting memories, references to Jewish traditions and spontaneous projections of his own mind are among the most unique modernist expressions of the 20th century and are praised for their bold, emotional use of colour.
Raised by deeply religious Jewish parents, Chagall first received an artistic education under a local painter before entering the Imperial School for the Protection of the Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. He moved to Paris in 1910 where he met influential figures such as Apollinaire, Delaunay, Léger and Modigliani. This experience brought him closer to the aggressive avant-garde aesthetics of Fauvism and Cubism, but his works remained unique in their fantastic, subjective imagery.
After holding several successful exhibitions, Chagall returned to Russia where he remained until 1923, unable to leave due to the outbreak of World War I. He worked as Fine Arts Commissar for the province of Vitebsk and was appointed the director of a local art academy.
From his very first artistic attempts in the 1910s, Chagall immediately focused on the Russian-Jewish influences that remained with him throughout his life. Mysticism, his childhood memories and a deep engagement with his religious roots combined with modernist elements such as formal and chromatic experimentation. His whimsical, somewhat naive images, such as ‘Paris through the Window’ (1913), conveyed both emotional metaphors and supernatural otherworldly visions from dreams. This peculiar combination brought him not only critical acclaim but also commercial success.
Chagall spent the years between the wars travelling throughout Europe and Palestine, producing paintings, book illustrations, murals and watercolours. In 1941, however, due to the rising threat of the Nazi expansion in Europe and his reputation as a high-profile Jew, he escaped to America with his wife. They settled in New York where he held many successful shows and continued to develop his artistic practice, exploring new territories such as theatre scenography. However, he never learned English and continued to long for France. In this period his unique aesthetic, altered by war, alienation and personal loss, became increasingly meditative and melancholic.
By this time, also thanks to numerous exhibitions and retrospectives, Chagall’s fame became international. His art was praised for his masterful use of colour and his symbolism which, although steeped in Jewish folk culture and personal memories, remained accessible and expressive. Chagall left America in 1947 and subsequently embarked on new and challenging public projects, such as the design for the stained glass windows of the synagogue of the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Centre in Jerusalem (1962). He also designed and painted the ceiling of the Paris Opéra from 1963 to 1964, in which Parisian monuments, people, animals and supernatural beings float harmoniously within impressionistic splashes of colours.
At the time of his death in 1985, Chagall’s works were displayed in extensive collections in museums and galleries around the world. Combining features of Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism and Expressionism in uniquely personal figurations, his works show extraordinary awareness of the emotional powers of colour. An artist whose practice cannot be pigeonholed, Chagall remains popular to this day, as do his moving, ethereal figurations.
DEAD SOULS
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall was already 35 years old when he started experimenting with printmaking techniques, having published a small collection of coloured lithographs while living in Berlin in the 1920s. These works impressed the influential French dealer Ambroise Vollard, who in 1923 commissioned Chagall to create a series of etchings to illustrate a special edition of Nikolay Gogol’s 1842 novel ‘Dead Souls’. This commission was the first of a long and fruitful artistic collaboration with Vollard.
Gogol’s novel follows the mysterious con artist Chichikov in his attempts to acquire ‘dead souls’. Structured around independent episodes and archetypical characters, ‘Dead Souls’ constitutes an irreverent caricature of imperial Russia’s corrupt society. By 1926 Chagall had produced more than a hundred black and white etchings for the book, his avoidance of colour perhaps mirroring Gogol’s bleak universe. The resulting illustrations convey the artist’s trademark fantastical, dreamlike aesthetic, which captured through its animated figures the essence of Gogol’s satirical writings.
Rather than striving to produce an artistic whole with this series, Chagall reproduced distinct passages from the novel, attempting to faithfully reproduce not only its narrative but also its subversive irony and humour. Playing with his own Expressionist language and cultural influences from his Russian upbringing, he produced a close yet creative visual equivalent of each scene.
In these images, figures do not simply portray characters but are intended as representations of the human condition. In Chagall’s liberated, childlike etchings viewers can find misery and mockery as well as wholesome joy and vitality. The volume was not released until 1949 by the publisher Tériade, and its illustrations have since been recognised as one of Chagall’s most significant series. Merging comical and tragic elements, they convey imaginative visions that enrich the creative reality of Gogol’s masterpiece.
DAPHNIS AND CHLOE
Marc Chagall
In the 1950s, inspired by his recent travels in Greece, Marc Chagall found a new site of inspiration in the ancient Greek novel ‘Daphnis and Chloe’, which he translated into a series of 42 lithographs. These works, completed between 1957 and 1960 and finally published in 1961, are now celebrated for their unique use of colour, encapsulating Chagall’s unparalleled mastery of tones and nuances.
The original story was written by the ancient Greek author Longus in the 2nd century CE and was famously adapted by Maurice Ravel for his 1912 ballet. The narrative follows the two shepherds Daphnis and Chloe who meet, fall in love, get separated and finally find each other after a long series of adventures at sea. In the novel, the penetrating psychology of the two characters is integrated with descriptions of landscapes and a general idealisation of pastoral life.
Chagall interpreted this story through his poetic use of colour, using as many as 25 shades for each illustration. If his designs are bright and vibrant, conveying the luminous Mediterranean landscapes he saw on his travels, colours themselves becomes discursive, transforming into symbols and themes that develop alongside the narrative. The characters’ innocence, their love for each other and their harmonious relationship with nature are transmitted through warm red backgrounds. Greens embody the quiet, happy life on Lesbos, oranges signify lustful passion, rich blues indicate night and tranquillity and dark reds suggest battles.
Feelings of love, loss and desire become one with Chagall’s intense shades. On surfaces completely covered in colours, where characters float freely alongside animals and mythological figures, the artist conveyed an infinite range of human emotion.
JERUSALEM WINDOWS
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall is famous for designing a set of stained glass windows which now decorate the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Centre Synagogue, located in the Judaean Hills of Jerusalem. These windows, commissioned in the late 1950s and unveiled in 1962, depict the 12 sons of the Patriarch Jacob from whom came the Twelve Tribes of Israel. These characters are represented through abstract Jewish symbols, cosmic elements and floating animals, fish and flowers. This overwhelming figuration, composed of powerful chromatic combinations, constitutes a microcosm of Chagall’s world and expresses his profound connection with Jewish history. ‘All the time I was working, I felt my mother and father looking over my shoulder’ he stated, ‘and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews – of yesterday and a thousand years ago’.
In preparation for these monumental windows, Chagall produced a large number of studies on paper, which were transposed into a series of lithographs in 1962. Keen to replicate not only each figure, but also the unique chromatic effects he obtained on glass, the artist worked closely with the publishers to ensure a perfect correspondence of colour and shading.
These lithographs reveal Chagall’s creative process for the production of his stained glass windows. Their kaleidoscopic compositions, displaying whirling reds, greens, purples, yellows and blues, constitute a celebration of Jewish histories and heritage. The variety of simplified forms and elements symbolise spiritual metaphors and narratives of hope and regeneration which would particularly resonate with the people of Israel.
Chagall’s ‘Jerusalem’ lithographs constitute a definitive testament to the artist’s unparalleled awareness of the expressive potentials of colour. These ethereal works, dense with spiritual meanings yet spontaneous and touching, remain among Chagall’s most famous and well-loved works on paper.
THE BIBLE
Marc Chagall
Profoundly inspired by his religious upbringing, Marc Chagall considered the stories and symbols of the Old Testament as archetypes of a greater, higher world. ‘The Bible is like an echo of nature and this secret I have tried to transmit’, he stated. In 1931, after a visit to Palestine, he started working on a series of illustrations for the Bible which would become a lifelong project. By 1939, Chagall completed 65 plates and, after a hiatus caused by the outbreak of World War II, he produced another 40 by 1956.
The resulting series, simply known as ‘The Bible’, spans 25 years and is collected in two volumes, together totalling at 105 etchings showing episodes and characters from the Old and New Testaments. This series was supplemented by a later series of drawings produced between 1958 and 1960.
Chagall chose to represent the most meaningful and evocative episodes from the Bible, including the Creation of Man, Noah’s Ark and Moses freeing his people. These scenes are depicted through Chagall’s unique style, fantastical and imaginative yet meditative and introspective. Each illustration conveys awe, sadness or happiness, expressed through the artist’s shining, emotional colours.
In these prints, Chagall highlighted the sheer humanity of the characters he depicted, with their moments of weakness and doubt as well as their times of triumph and joy. Through his bright colour palette and dramatic shading, the artist’s ethereal figurations translated into image the Bible’s sacred, universal narratives.
Chagall’s fantastical imagery of floating characters, simplified shapes and intense colours assimilated the powerful and emotional message of his source material. This series reflects his ongoing fascination for humanity’s tales of tragedy and hope.
THE CIRCUS
Marc Chagall
‘For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world’, said Marc Chagall on one of his most iconic series of artworks. Amazed by travelling performers during his childhood in rural Russia, once in Paris he regularly visited the circus where he sat in the audience and sketched. In ‘The Circus’ drawings Chagall attempted to capture the colourful, magical and chaotic atmosphere which incorporated all aspects of life, from the comedic to the tragic.
In later years Chagall began to translate these rough sketches into preparatory studies. In 1950, he painted ‘The Dance and the Circus’ and ‘The Blue Circus’, produced in preparation for two large murals commissioned to decorate the auditorium of the Watergate theatre in London. For these works he also incorporated his love for and knowledge of theatre scenography and costume design. Animated by performers and animals floating on blue and yellow backgrounds, these images are dominated by a sense of unrestrained happiness and wonder, seemingly invading the everyday rhythms of normal life.
The popularity of these sketches prompted Chagall to produce a series of lithographs, 23 in colour and 15 in black and white, published in 1967 as a collection under the title ‘Le Cirque’. Working directly on the lithography stone to achieve his trademark spontaneity of lines and colours, Chagall transposed the sense of unlimited freedom into the prints. These images amplify the theatrics of circus performances, transforming them into magical displays of dreamlike splendour.
Chagall’s own otherworldly and dreamlike aesthetic found a natural counterpart in the circus performers’ gaudy costumes and make up. Perhaps, the nomadic existence of clowns and acrobats represented for Chagall an immediate metaphor for his own life.
