![]() ![]() One of the main sources of income for the Jewish population of the town was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout the Russian Empire. ![]() Buttered bread, like an eternal symbol, was never out of my childish hands. There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table. Why try to hide it? How tell about it? No word will ever ease my father's lot. Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. On his return he made ready the samovar, drank some tea and went to work. There he said his usual prayer for some dead man or other. Chagall wrote of those early years:ĭay after day, winter and summer, at six o'clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels, earning 20 roubles each month (the average wages across the Russian Empire was 13 roubles a month). His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant, and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home. The family name, Shagal, is a variant of the name Segal, which in a Jewish community was usually borne by a Levitic family. Because the city was built mostly of wood, little of it survived years of occupation and destruction during World War II.Ĭhagall was the eldest of nine children. A picturesque city of churches and synagogues, it was called "Russian Toledo" by artist Ilya Repin, after the cosmopolitan city of the former Spanish Empire. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was about 66,000. Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887, into a Jewish family in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. Marc Chagall, 1912, The Spoonful of Milk (La Cuillerée de lait), gouache on paper Currently site of the Marc Chagall Museum. Early life and education Early life Marc Chagall's childhood home in Vitebsk, Belarus. Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk." "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is". He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz as well as the Fraumünster in Zürich, windows for the UN and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's pre-eminent Jewish artist". Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". During World War II, he escaped occupied France to the United States, where he lived in New York City for seven years before returning to France in 1948.Īrt critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century". He later worked in and near Moscow in difficult conditions during a tough time in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, before leaving again for Paris in 1923. He spent the wartime years in his native Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College. During that period, he created his own mixture and style of modern art, based on his ideas of Eastern European and Jewish folklore. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.Ĭhagall was born in 1887, into a Jewish family near Vitebsk, today in Belarus, but at that time in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Marc Chagall (born Moishe Shagal 6 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. ![]()
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