Marc Chagall

pseudonym: -

birth data

date of birth: 1887

place of birth: Witebsk

death data

date of death: 1985

death: St. Paul de Vence

biography

Marc Chagall was born the eldest of nine children into a Jewish family in the town of Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, on 7 July 1887. He received his first artistic training in 1907-10 in St. Petersburg at the private Zvantseva art school, at which Léon Bakst was director. Chagall then went to Paris where he encountered contemporary art movements and the avant-garde that were to influence his painting. The artist was given his first solo exhibition in 1914 in Herwarth Waldens Berlin gallery, Der Sturm. Chagall experienced the outbreak of World War I in his native Vitebsk where he was appointed a commissary for the visual arts in 1918. Moreover, he founded an art academy where El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich also taught. In 1922 Chagall finally turned his back on Russia and initially lived in Berlin and then in Paris from 1923 onwards. He was asked by the renowned art dealer Ambroise Vollard to illustrate Nikolai Gogols novel Dead Souls in 1923. Further commissions to create cycles of illustrations followed after 1927 as, for example, for La Fontaines fables. From 1931-39 and again after 1952, Marc Chagall worked on his illustrations of the bible that were published in 1956.

In his works Marc Chagall picks up on elements of Russian folk art, Jewish mysticism and ancient legends as well as creating scenes combined with fantasy images. Frequently recurring motifs such as lovers, the crescent-shaped moon, the cockerel and the Jewish shtetl are all to be found in his ouvre. In addition to paintings, Chagall created extensive cycles of engravings as well as numerous lithographs. Between 1950 and 1970 he worked on a number of commissions for public buildings. He designed glass windows for Metz Cathedral and Notre-Dame in Reims, the synagogue at the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem and St. Stephens Church in Mainz. From 1963 he worked on a large ceiling painting for the dome over the auditorium in the opera house in Paris and, from 1964, he created the wall paintings at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1941 Chagall decided to emigrate to the USA. The first comprehensive retrospective of his work was held in 1946 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1947, after the end of World War II, the artist returned to Paris before finally settling in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1950 where he died on 28 March 1985.