Marc Chagall 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.
106 Facts About Marc Chagall
2.
Marc Chagall later worked in and near Moscow in difficult conditions in a tough time in Russia, before leaving again for Paris in 1923.
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Marc Chagall did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opera.
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Marc Chagall had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist.
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Marc Chagall 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".
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Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in a Jewish family in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk in 1887.
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Marc Chagall's father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles each month.
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Robert Delaunay 8.
Marc Chagall related how he realised that the Jewish traditions in which he had grown up were fast disappearing and that he needed to document them.
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Marc 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.
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Marc Chagall therefore received his primary education at the local Jewish religious school, where he studied Hebrew and the Bible.
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Baal-Teshuva writes that for the young Marc Chagall, watching someone draw "was like a vision, a revelation in black and white".
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When Marc Chagall asked the schoolmate how he learned to draw, his friend replied, "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it".
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Marc Chagall soon began copying images from books and found the experience so rewarding he then decided he wanted to become an artist.
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Marc Chagall eventually confided to his mother, "I want to be a painter", although she could not yet understand his sudden interest in art or why he would choose a vocation that "seemed so impractical", writes Goodman.
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However, after a few months at the school, Marc Chagall realized that academic portrait painting did not suit his desires.
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Years later, at the age of 57 while living in the United States, Marc Chagall confirmed this when he published an open letter entitled, "To My City Vitebsk":.
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Marc Chagall enrolled in a prestigious art school and studied there for two years.
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Marc Chagall was an active member of the irregular freemasonic lodge, the Grand Orient of Russia's Peoples.
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Between 1908 and 1910, Marc Chagall was a student of Leon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting.
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Bakst, Jewish, was a designer of decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes, and helped Marc Chagall by acting as a role model for Jewish success.
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Marc Chagall stayed in Saint Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met Bella Rosenfeld.
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In 1910, Marc Chagall relocated to Paris to develop his artistic style.
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Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Marc Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form, and French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th century".
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Art historian Jean Leymarie observes that Marc Chagall began thinking of art as "emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring", which was the reverse of the Cubist way of creating.
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Marc Chagall therefore developed friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde artists including Robert Delaunay and Fernand Leger.
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Robert Delaunay 26.
Marc Chagall would spend his free hours visiting galleries and salons, especially the Louvre; artists he came to admire included Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and others.
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Marc Chagall was exhilarated, intoxicated, as he strolled through the streets and along the banks of the Seine.
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Marc Chagall enthusiastically reviewed their many different tendencies, having to rethink his position as an artist and decide what creative avenue he wanted to pursue.
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Marc Chagall developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky,.
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Marc Chagall did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself.
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Marc Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited.
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In 1915, Marc Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow, first exhibiting his works at a well-known salon and in 1916 exhibiting pictures in St Petersburg.
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Marc Chagall again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists.
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Marc Chagall began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings.
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Marc Chagall was 30 years old and had begun to become well known.
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Marc Chagall was often hungry for days, later remembering watching "a bride, the beggars and the poor wretches weighted down with bundles", leading him to conclude that the new regime had turned the Russian Empire "upside down the way I turn my pictures".
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Marc Chagall 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.
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Marc Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective of independently minded artists, each with their own unique style.
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Marc Chagall created it as a "storehouse of symbols and devices", notes Lewis.
40.
Marc Chagall applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography, My Life.
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Marc Chagall formed a business relationship with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard.
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Marc Chagall instead stayed in France, "painting ceaselessly", notes Baal-Teshuva.
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Marc Chagall interrogates life in the light of a refined, anxious, childlike sensibility, a slightly romantic temperament.
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Marc Chagall made repeated trips to the countryside, taking his sketchbook.
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Marc Chagall visited nearby countries and later wrote about the impressions some of those travels left on him:.
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Robert Delaunay 46.
Dizengoff had previously encouraged Marc Chagall to visit Tel Aviv in connection with Dizengoff's plan to build a Jewish Art Museum in the new city.
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Marc Chagall ended up staying in the Holy Land for two months.
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Marc Chagall felt at home in Israel where many people spoke Yiddish and Russian.
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Marc Chagall later told a friend that Israel gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received".
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Marc Chagall adds that beginning the assignment was an "extraordinary risk" for Chagall, as he had finally become well known as a leading contemporary painter, but would now end his modernist themes and delve into "an ancient past".
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Marc Chagall walked the streets of the city's Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere.
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Marc Chagall returned to France and by the next year had completed 32 out of the total of 105 plates.
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Not long after Marc Chagall began his work on the Bible, Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany.
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Marc Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until October 1940, after the Vichy government, at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, began approving anti-Semitic laws, that he began to understand what was happening.
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Marc Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by this operation.
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Marc Chagall left France in May 1941, "when it was almost too late", adds Lewis.
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Marc Chagall became a celebrity mostly against his will, feeling lost in the strange surroundings.
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Marc Chagall spent time visiting galleries and museums, and befriended other artists including Piet Mondrian and Andre Breton.
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Baal-Teshuva writes that Marc Chagall "loved" going to the sections of New York where Jews lived, especially the Lower East Side.
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Marc Chagall was offered a commission by choreographer Leonide Massine of the Ballet Theatre of New York to design the sets and costumes for his new ballet, Aleko.
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Marc Chagall found "something very closely related to his own nature", and did all the color detail for the sets while there.
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Marc Chagall learned that the Germans had destroyed the town where he was raised, Vitebsk, and became greatly distressed.
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Marc Chagall went back for good during the autumn of 1947, where he attended the opening of the exhibition of his works at the Musee National d'Art Moderne.
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When Matisse dies, Marc Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color is.
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Marc Chagall's canvases are really painted, not just tossed together.
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Robert Delaunay 66.
Marc Chagall became his secretary, and after a few months agreed to stay only if Chagall married her.
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Marc Chagall began working in larger-scale formats, producing large murals, stained glass windows, mosaics and tapestries.
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In 1963, Marc Chagall was commissioned to paint the new ceiling for the Paris Opera, a majestic 19th-century building and national monument.
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Andre Malraux, France's Minister of Culture wanted something unique and decided Marc Chagall would be the ideal artist.
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Nonetheless, Marc Chagall continued the project, which took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete.
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The images Marc Chagall painted on the canvas paid tribute to the composers Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel, as well as to famous actors and dancers.
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Marc Chagall is above all one of the great colourists of our time.
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Marc Chagall's colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes and rhythms.
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Marc Chagall was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors.
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Marc Chagall is perhaps the only artist today I could get along with without having to say a single word.
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Marc Chagall's early pictures were often of the town where he was born and raised, Vitebsk.
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Marc Chagall managed to blend the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color the pictures were always at least acceptable if not powerful.
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Marc Chagall never attempted to present pure reality but always created his atmospheres through fantasy.
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Marc Chagall gave the grim life of Hasidic Jews the "romantic overtones of a charmed world", notes Goodman.
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Marc Chagall would become one of many Jewish emigres who later became noted artists, all of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most numerous and creative minorities", notes Goodman.
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Marc Chagall wants to help me weep and recite chapters of Psalms.
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Marc Chagall was at pains to distance his work from a single Jewish focus.
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Marc Chagall envisaged the synagogue as "a crown offered to the Jewish Queen", and the windows as "jewels of translucent fire", she writes.
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Marc Chagall then devoted the next two years to the task, and upon completion in 1961 the windows were exhibited in Paris and then the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
85.
At the dedication ceremony in 1962, Marc Chagall described his feelings about the windows:.
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Robert Delaunay 86.
In 1964 Marc Chagall created a stained-glass window, entitled Peace, for the UN in honor of Dag Hammarskjold, the UN's second secretary general who was killed in an airplane crash in Africa in 1961.
87.
Marc Chagall corresponded with Chagall during 1973, and succeeded in persuading the "master of colour and the biblical message" to create a sign for Jewish-Christian attachment and international understanding.
88.
In 1978, at the age of 91, Marc Chagall created the first window and eight more followed.
89.
The other three religious buildings with complete sets of Marc Chagall windows are the Hadassah Medical Center synagogue, the Chapel of Le Saillant, Limousin, and the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York.
90.
When Marc Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, and saw the church for the first time, he exclaimed "" Over the next ten years Marc Chagall designed the remaining eleven windows, made again in collaboration with the glassworker Charles Marq in his workshop at Reims in northern France.
91.
Marc Chagall visited Chicago in the early 1970s to install his mural The Four Seasons, and at that time was inspired to create a set of stained glass windows for the Art Institute of Chicago.
92.
Marc Chagall first worked on stage designs in 1914 while living in Russia, under the inspiration of the theatrical designer and artist Leon Bakst.
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Marc Chagall's set designs helped create illusory atmospheres which became the essence of the theatrical performances.
94.
Marc Chagall painted two monumental murals which hang on opposite sides of the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in New York which opened in 1966.
95.
Marc Chagall designed tapestries which were woven under the direction of Yvette Cauquil-Prince, who collaborated with Picasso.
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Marc Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12-floor mosaics and a wall mosaic.
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Marc Chagall began learning about ceramics and sculpture while living in south France.
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Marc Chagall took classes along with other known artists including Picasso and Fernand Leger.
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At first Marc Chagall painted existing pieces of pottery but soon expanded into designing his own, which began his work as a sculptor as a complement to his painting.
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Marc Chagall's final work was a commissioned piece of art for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.
101.
The maquette painting titled Job had been completed, but Marc Chagall died just before the completion of the tapestry.
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Marc Chagall would have died without Jewish rites, had not a Jewish stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over his coffin.
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Marc Chagall is buried alongside his last wife Valentina "Vava" Brodsky Marc Chagall, in the multi-denominational cemetery in the traditional artists' town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the French region of Provence.
104.
Marc Chagall has unveiled possibilities unsuspected by an art that had lost touch with the Bible, and in doing so he has achieved a wholly new synthesis of Jewish culture long ignored by painting.
105.
Marc Chagall has looked at our world with the light of freedom, and seen it with the colours of love.
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Robert Delaunay 106.
In 2013, previously unknown works by Marc Chagall were discovered in the stash of artworks hidden away by the son of one of Hitler's art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt.