Marc Chagall, whose real name was Moyshe Segal, was born on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Belarus. The eldest of nine siblings, he grew up in a Jewish family steeped in religious culture. He attended the traditional Jewish elementary school in Vitebsk, before moving on to the city's secular secondary school.
At the end of 1906, after a brief period in the studio of the painter Jehuda Pen in Vitebsk, he moved to Saint Petersburg. He enrolled at the Drawing School founded by the Imperial Society for the Protection of Fine Arts, which he left in the summer of 1908. He then studied modern art with Léon Bakst, painter and decorator for Serge Diaghilev's Russian ballets, at the Svanseva School. He discovers "living modern art."[1] and intellectual and literary circles. Bakst taught him the importance of color. He was also inspired by the ancient icons to be found in the churches of St. Petersburg. Russian folklore was another major source of inspiration for his art. At the end of the summer of 1909, he met Bella Rosenfeld, and fell head over heels in love with her.
Hommage à Apollinaire, 1913, oil on canvas, 200, 4 x 189, 5 cm, Eindhoven, van Abbemuseum
Arend Vermazeren / © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
Thanks to a scholarship, Chagall arrived in Paris in May 1911. He enrolled first at the Académie de la Palette, where he studied with Dunoyer de Segonzac, then at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he could work from a model. He discovered Parisian avant-garde art, in particular Fauvism and Cubism, which were essential milestones in his training. His art changed. Color became his principal means of expression, and his palette brightened and colored, combined with a geometric division of form and space.
He frequented galleries, salons and the Louvre. It was a period of wonderment for the "City of Light" and its intense colors. For André Breton, 1911 was the year of Chagall's "total lyrical explosion. It is from this moment that metaphor, with him alone, marks its triumphant entry into modern painting."[2].
In the winter of 1912, he moved to La Ruche, an artists' commune where Chaïm Soutine, Amedeo Modigliani, Fernand Léger, Henri Laurens and Ossip Zadkine lived. His studio enabled him to paint large-scale works such as La Noce(Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou), a joyful fresco almost two meters long, based on the memory of a Jewish wedding celebrated in his native village. Marked by the geometrization of cubism, the space is totally compartmentalized by color, recalling the orphism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. La Noce already brings together two essential aspects of his work: a highly personal iconography based on memories, and the importance of color. The artist exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants (notably Dédié à ma fiancée, 1911, Bern, Kunstmuseum) and the Salon d'Automne(Golgotha, 1912, New York, MoMA).
This period was marked by important encounters. Chagall befriended the poet Blaise Cendrars, who was close to the Delaunay couple. He met Guillaume Apollinaire, who was close to Pablo Picasso and Max Jacob. He painted Hommage à Apollinaire in 1912-1913 (Eindhoven, Van Abbe Museum). The poet introduced him to Herwarth Walden, founder of the Berlin gallery Der Sturm and the magazine of the same name, and a strong supporter of German Expressionism and avant-garde art in general. In the summer of 1914, Walden organized the first major exhibition of Chagall's work at his gallery.
Les Amoureux en vert, 1916-1917, oil on canvas, 69.7 x 49.5 cm, Paris, Musée national d'Art moderne, Centre Pompidou
MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
In 1914, Chagall returned to Vitebsk for a short stay. He returned to his roots while continuing his dialogue with Cubism. He reunited with Bella, who inspired a series of works on the theme of lovers: Les Amoureux, 1913-1914 (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Les Amoureux en vert, 1916-1917 (Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou). The motif of lovers in flight, characteristic of his work, appears at this time. The outbreak of war forces him to remain in Russia.
On July 25, 1915 Marc Chagall and Bella marry. In September, they moved to St. Petersburg. Their daughter Ida was born the following year. The couple frequented the Russian intelligentsia, meeting poets Alexander Block, Sergei Essenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Boris Pasternak. Chagall became a household name. In 1916, he exhibited with the Valet de Carreau, an association promoting modern art. In 1918 he was appointed commissioner of fine arts for the Vitebsk region. He created the city's museum of contemporary art and art school. He assembled a team of teachers including Kasimir Malevitch, El Lissitzky and Jean Pougny. Disagreeing with Malévitch's dogmatism, Chagall left the school in June 1920 and moved to Moscow. Under the aegis of Malevich and Suprematism, the school became theOunovis, an institute for the new in art.
At the dawn of the twenties, his compatriot Serge de Diaghilev organized numerous ballets in Paris and London, with the collaboration of the leading figures in modern art, including Picasso, Matisse and Derain. In Moscow at the same time, Chagall also experimented with stage decoration, following in the footsteps of his former teacher Léon Bakst. In 1919, he created the sets and costumes for The Revizor by his compatriot Nicolas Gogol for the Satirical Theatre in Moscow. The following year, he was invited to work at Aleksei Granovski's Gossiet (Moscow's Jewish Chamber Theater). He designed the sets and costumes for Sholom Aleichem's Miniatures. He also designed the theater's decor. He painted a number of panels, including Introduction to the Jewish Theater, Music, Dance, Theater, Literature (all preserved in Moscow's Tretyakov National Gallery), the curtain in front of the stage and the ceiling decoration. This decorative ensemble includes many elements developed by the artist in his later work. "I found in these sets a certain acrobatics of forms, a certain magic of sounds, of singular chords, a happy atmosphere of pirouettes of forms in space, like precursory signs."[3].
Nozdriov, 1930, black etching on Arches, 38.5 x 28.5 cm, plate 23 from the illustrated book Les Âmes mortes, Tériade Éditeur, Paris
Galerie de l'Institut / © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
In April 1922, Chagall left Russia for Berlin, another capital of the arts, which was then experiencing a remarkable intellectual and artistic effervescence. He produced his first engravings - he was thirty-five at the time - at the request of the merchant-publisher Paul Cassirer, to illustrate his autobiography, Ma Vie. On September1, 1923, he returned to Paris with his family. Through his friend Blaise Cendrars, Chagall came into contact with the famous art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, for whom he illustrated Nicolas Gogol's Dead Souls, followed by Jean de La Fontaine's Fables (1926-1927), and a set of nineteen gouaches entitled Cirque Vollard (late 1927).
In 1924, the first retrospective of his work was held in Paris at the Galerie Barbazangues-Hodebert. These were the years of the official birth of Surrealism. André Breton publishes the Manifesto in 1924. Paul Eluard and Max Ernst visit Chagall in the hope of getting him to join the group, but to no avail. Chagall insisted on remaining independent. Nevertheless, his work undeniably displays real affinities with Surrealism, notably its strong onirism. For Breton, "there has been nothing more resolutely magical than this work, whose admirable prism colors carry away and transfigure modern torment."[4].
During the same years, Chagall became close to Christian Zervos, founder of the magazine Cahiers d'Art in 1926, and Tériade, who was in charge of the pages devoted to modern art. The latter published an article on the artist in the sixth issue of that first year.[5]. At the end of 1926, Chagall signed a contract with the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. The preparatory gouaches for the Fables were presented in February 1930. The exhibition then moved on to Galerie du Centaure in Brussels and Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin. The exhibition was a complete success, selling out.
Chagall travels to France. He discovered Nice, which seduced him with its light and vegetation. In 1931, he was invited to Palestine by the mayor of Tel Aviv, Meïr Dizengoff, who was planning to create a museum of Jewish art. He stayed from February to April. On his return, he produced gouaches for the illustration of the Bible, another of Vollard's commissions from the previous year. They are now part of the collections of the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall. It was also in 1930, at a time of growth for the artist's book, and undoubtedly following on from the impetus given by Vollard, that the young Swiss publisher Albert Skira commissioned Picasso to illustrate Ovid's Métamorphoses , and the following year, Matisse to illustrate Mallarmé's Poésies.
The rise of Nazism leads the German regime to take measures against Chagall's work. An auto-da-fé of his works was organized at the Kunsthalle in Mannheim. Like most modern artists, Chagall was branded a "degenerate artist" by the Nazis. His works were included in the "Entartete Kunst" exhibition held in Munich from July 19, 1937, alongside a selection of avant-garde works removed from the walls of German museums. Thanks to the intervention of writer Jean Paulhan, head of La Nouvelle Revue Française, Chagall obtained French nationality in 1937, which he had been refused in 1933. Shortly before the outbreak of war, worried by the growing threat, Chagall moved to Saint-Dyé-sur-Loire, taking his studio canvases with him. In May 1940, he fled south of the Loire to Gordes in the free zone.
La Guerre, 1943, oil on canvas, 106 x 76 cm, Céret, Musée d'Art Moderne (on loan from the Centre Pompidou)
Center Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacqueline Hyde © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
In 1941, he left France for New York. He benefited from the Emergency Rescue Committee set up to rescue intellectuals and artists threatened by the German authorities. As with many other personalities, his departure was organized by Varian Fry from Marseille.
He arrives in New York on June 21. Across the Atlantic, Pierre Matisse, son of the painter Henri Matisse, became Chagall's dealer. Chagall takes part in the famous group show Artists in exile, which he organizes in his gallery from March 3 to 28, 1942, bringing together artists such as Matta, Ernst, Masson, Tanguy, Breton, Léger, Lipchitz, Mondrian, Ozenfant and Zadkine. That same year, Léonide Massine, artistic director of Les Ballets de Monte Carlo, in America since the start of the war, commissions him to design the sets and costumes forAleko, based on Alexander Pushkin's Gypsies, with music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The ballet premiered in Mexico City at the Palacio de Bellas Artes on September 8, 1942, and was subsequently performed in New York at the Metropolitan Opera House.
This threatening period for his occupied native Russia and the fate of the Jews left behind in Europe inspired him to create works with a tragic tone in terms of color, composition and subject. The cycle of four paintings, created between 1940 and 1943 and entitled Le Village et la Guerre (The Village and the War) by Franz Meyer, to which La Guerre in the Musée d'Art Moderne de Céret belongs, is a good illustration of this. The theme of crucifixion, the embodiment of human suffering, also became recurrent. Added to this was the sudden death of his wife Bella on September 2, 1944. Chagall was devastated. He did not paint for nine months. In 1945, he created the sets for Igor Stravinsky's The Firebird.
By the end of the war, the artist had gained international recognition. From 1946 onwards, his work was the subject of several exhibitions: at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (April to June 1946), followed by a stopover in Chicago, at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris (October 17 - December 22, 1947), at the Tate Gallery in London (February 1948), at the Venice Biennale in 1948, where he received the engraving prize, and at the Kunsthaus in Zurich (December 1950 - January 1951).
RMN-Grand Palais (Musée Marc Chagall) / Gérard Blot © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
Chagall returned to France for good in August 1948. He settled in Orgeval, near Paris. The following year, he spent several periods in the South of France, in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, Saint-Jeannet and Vence. " As I approached the Côte d'Azur, I felt a sense of regeneration, something I'd forgotten since childhood. The scent of flowers, a kind of new energy was pouring into me."[6]. Seduced by the intensity of the Mediterranean landscape and its light, Chagall moved to Vence, villa Les Collines, in the spring of 1950. After the war, the region was very popular with artists. At the time, Pablo Picasso was in Vallauris, Henri Matisse in Nice, Georges Rouault in Golfe-Juan and the publisher Tériade in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. Chagall became close to Tériade, who took over Vollard's book projects, which had been put on hold after his accidental death in July 1939 and the war. In addition to his books, Chagall contributed to the magazine Verve, created by Tériade in 1937. He executed drawings around Boccaccio's Decameron, to which the publisher devoted an entire issue entitled Contes de Boccace (vol. VI, n°24, 1950), and later in 1956 and 1960 two other special issues of Verve dedicated to Chagall's work on La Bible (vol. IX, n°33-34; vol. X, n°37-38).
This new contact with the Mediterranean, like his stay at Mourillon in 1926, was accompanied by a major renewal in his painting. Bright, luminous color resurfaced around subjects that bore witness to a new-found happiness. Every day in Vence, he relives "the miracle of growth and flowering in the strong yet soft light that bathes the whole space."[7]. In a very personal language, Chagall created a mythical Mediterranean in which his favorite motifs took their place. The lovers' couple, the rooster, the violin or violinist, the fish, the donkey, the moon and the bouquets are among the most recurrent figures in his iconography. The artist combines them in a poetic, dreamlike universe freed from all constraints of space and scale.
"In my use of pictorial elements, I feel more "abstract" than Mondrian or Kandinsky. "Abstract' not in the sense that my painting is not reminiscent of reality. [...] By 'abstract', I mean something that comes to life spontaneously through a whole palette of contrasts both plastic and psychic, a conception of new and unfamiliar elements that invade both the painting and the viewer's eye."[8].
In France, Aimé Maeght became his dealer, while Pierre Matisse retained the American market. In the early 1950s, Chagall diversified his practice. He produced his first ceramics at Suzanne and Georges Ramié's Madoura studio in Vallauris, where Picasso also worked. At the same time, he took up sculpture, a lesser-known part of his work, with the marble-maker and carver Lanfranco Lisarelli. Most of his sculptures are high and low reliefs, rondes-bosses and a few slabs featuring the same motifs as his paintings. From 1952, the Maeght gallery presented ceramics and sculptures by the artist, including Amoureux au bouquet in Rognes stone (private collection). Chagall returned regularly to Paris, where he devoted himself to engraving and lithography. He frequented Fernand Mourlot's studio, where he met Charles Sorlier, who became his main collaborator for the printing of his lithographs. In 1952, Chagall remarried Valentina Brodsky, known as "Vava".
Marc Chagall, Charles Marcq and Brigitte Simon, La création de l'Homme, des Animaux, de la Femme et l'Expulsion du Paradis, 1958-1968, stained glass, Metz, Cathédrale Saint-Étienne-de-Metz
Jean-Pierre Dalbéra / © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
In the 1950s and right up to the end of his career, Chagall's activity was particularly focused on decoration. Commissions multiplied. They were to become increasingly important.
Against the backdrop of the revival of sacred art that began in 1950 - Matisse decorated the Rosary chapel of the Dominicaines de Vence, Picasso designed La Guerre et La Paix for the chapel of the Château de Vallauris, Braque designed stained glass windows for the church of Saint Valéry and the chapel of Saint Dominique de Varengeville -, Chagall participated with Matisse, Léger, Rouault, Braque, Germaine Richier - whose Christ on the Cross caused a scandal - in the decoration of the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce on the Plateau d'Assy in Haute-Savoie. Father Marie-Alain Couturier, one of the main instigators of this turning point, entrusted him with the decoration of the baptistery. The artist designed a large ceramic mural , La Traversée de la mer rouge (The Crossing of the Red Sea), two marble bas-reliefs and two stained-glass windows created in collaboration with stained-glass artist Paul Bony. Completed in 1957.
He went on to create an impressive number of stained-glass windows, most of them for religious buildings, in response to public and private commissions. In 1958, he made the acquaintance of master glassmaker Charles Marq, from the Simon-Marq workshop in Reims. The figurative imagery of Chagall's stained glass gradually became an exception in the stained glass landscape of the second half of the twentieth century, which was dominated by abstraction. Among his creations are the stained glass windows for Metz Cathedral (1956-1959), and those for the synagogue of the Hadassah medical center in Jerusalem, representing the twelve tribes of Israel (1959-1961), exhibited at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and then at MoMA (between June 1961 and January 1962), the United Nations headquarters in New York(La Paix, 1964), the Union Church in Pocantico Hills near New York (1964 and 1965-1967), which stand alongside Matisse's stained-glass Rosace, his last work.
Maquette définitive pour le plafond de l'Opéra Garnier, Paris, 1963, pencil, colored pencil, India ink, pastels, gouache on paper, 140 x 140 cm, Paris, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou
Center Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Audrey Laurans © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
Chagall became famous in fields other than stained glass. In 1958, he returned to the stage. The Paris Opera commissioned him to design the sets and costumes for Maurice Ravel and Michel Fokine's ballet Daphnis et Chloé. In 1954, during his second stay in Greece and on his return, he had already painted the colorful gouaches illustrating the bucolic tale of Longus, which served as the matrix for the lithographs in the book published by Tériade in 1961. In 1966, he designed the sets and costumes for Mozart's Magic Flute for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, as well as two monumental murals, Les Sources de la musique and Le Triomphe de la musique.
In the meantime, in 1964, at the request of André Malraux, Minister of Cultural Affairs since 1959, Chagall created the ceiling decoration for the Opéra Garnier in Paris, intended to cover the original decoration, Museset les Heures du jour et de la nuit, painted in 1875 by Jules-Eugène Lenepveu. Chagall's composition pays tribute to the universal nature of music. It was inspired by the work of fourteen composers, including Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
In 1966, the artist and his wife settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in a house called "La Colline". The following year, they donated to the French state seventeen large-scale paintings making up the Message Biblique, a cycle begun in the early 1950s and originally intended for the major chapel of Calvaire in Vence, along with thirty-eight related gouaches. The donation stipulates the construction of a building to house the works. The ensemble was exhibited at the Louvre from June to October 1967. To illustrate the technical diversity of his production since the post-war period, the artist creates a tapestry for the entrance hall, a mosaic mural and three large stained-glass windows for the auditorium. The Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice was inaugurated on July 3, 1973.
The Creation of the World: The First Four Days, 1971-1972, stained glass, 465 x 396 cm, Nice, Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall
At Saint-Paul-de-Vence, he continues to design large-scale decorative programs. Stained-glass windows: Fraumünster Church, Zurich (1968-1970), Reims Cathedral (1969-1974), Chapelle des Cordeliers, Sarrebourg (1976-1977), St. Stephen's Church, Mainz. The three panels at the Art Institute of Chicago(Music and Painting, Poetry and Architecture, and Theater and Dance, inaugurated in 1977), the chapel of Saillant in Voutezac, Corrèze. He also created tapestries and mosaics: three tapestries, La Prophétie d'Isaïe, L'Exode and L'Entrée à Jérusalem, woven at the Manufacture des Gobelins, and a mural mosaic, Le Mur des Lamentations, and for the Israeli parliament, the Knesset (1966-1969), the mosaic Le Message d'Ulysse for the Université de Nice law faculty (1968), the monumental mosaic Les Quatre Saisons in Chicago's First National Plaza, commissioned by First National City Bank, installed in 1974.
Maquette for the stained-glass window, La Paix ou L'Arbre de vie, Chapelle des Cordeliers, Sarrebourg, 1976, pencil, watercolor, gouache and India ink on paper, 105, 5 x 66 cm, Nice, Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall
RMN-Grand Palais (Musée Marc Chagall) / Adrien Didierjean © ADAGP, Paris, 2023.
In 1973, after more than fifty years away from home, Chagall returned to Russia for an exhibition at the Tretyakov National Gallery in Moscow. In 1977, the artist was named Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, and an honorary citizen of Jerusalem the same year.
Finally, in 1984, three major retrospectives celebrated his ninety-seventh birthday: at the Centre Georges-Pompidou in Paris (work on paper), at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence (painted work) and at the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice (sculpted work and stained glass).
Chagall died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on March 28, 1985. He is buried in the Saint-Paul-de-Vence cemetery.
Anne Coron, Doctor in History of Contemporary Art
Louise Feld, Gallery assistant - Galerie de l'Institut
Gallery of the Institute
[1] Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1964, p. 59.
[2] André Breton, "Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme", 1941, in Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, Gallimard, [1965] 2002, p. 89.
[3] Chagall's words as reported by André Verdet in Entretiens, notes et écrits sur la peinture, Braque, Léger, Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Nantes, Éditions du Petit Véhicule, 2001, p. 215-216.
[4] André Breton, "Genèse et perspective artistiques du surréalisme", 1941, Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Paris, Gallimard, [1965], 2002, p. 89.
[5] Tériade, "Marc Chagall", Cahiers d'Art, n°6, 1926, pp. 122-127.
[6] Letter from Virginia Haggard to Adele and Joseph Opatoshu, May 26, 1950, in Benjamin Harshav, Marc Chagall and His Times, A Documentary Narrative, Stanford, University Press, 2004, p. 48.
[7] Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Paris, Flammarion, 1995, p. 250.
[8] Chagall's words quoted in James Johnson Sweeney, "An Interview with Marc Chagall", Partisan Review, vol. 11, no. 1, Winter 1944, pp. 88-93.