Marc Chagall (born July 7, 1887,Vitebsk,Belorussia,Russian Empire [now in Belarus]—died March 28, 1985, Saint-Paul, Alpes-Maritimes, France) was a Belorussian-born French painter, printmaker, and designer who composed his images based on emotional and poetic associations, rather than on rules of pictorial logic. PredatingSurrealism, his early works, such asI and the Village (1911), were among the first expressions of psychic reality inmodern art. His works in various media include sets for plays and ballets, etchings illustrating the Bible, and stained-glass windows.

Early life and works

Chagall was born in a small city in the western Russian Empire not far from the Polish frontier. His family, which included eight other children, was devoutly Jewish and, like the majority of the some 20,000 Jews in Vitebsk, humble without being poverty-stricken; his father worked in a herring warehouse, and his mother ran a shop where she sold fish, flour, sugar, and spices. The young Chagallattended the heder (Jewish elementary school) and later went to the local public school, where instruction was in Russian. After learning the elements of drawing at school, he studiedpainting in the studio of a local realist, Jehuda Pen, and in 1907 went toSt. Petersburg, where he studied intermittently for three years, eventually under the stage designerLéon Bakst. Characteristic works by Chagall from this period of early maturity are the nightmarishThe Dead Man (1908), which depicts a roof violinist (a favourite motif), andMy Fiancée with Black Gloves (1909), in which a portrait becomes an occasion for the artist to experiment with arranging black and white.

In 1910, with a living allowance provided by a St. Petersburg patron, Chagall went to Paris. After a year and a half in Montparnasse, he moved into a studio on the edge of town in the ramshackle settlement for bohemian artists that was known asLa Ruche (“the Beehive”). There, he met the avant-garde poetsBlaise Cendrars,Max Jacob, andGuillaume Apollinaire, as well as a number of young painters destined to become famous: theExpressionistChaim Soutine, the abstract colouristRobert Delaunay, and theCubistsAlbert Gleizes,Jean Metzinger,Fernand Léger, andAndré Lhote. In such company nearly every sort of pictorialaudacity was encouraged, and Chagall responded to the stimulus by rapidly developing the poetic and seemingly irrational tendencies he had begun to display inRussia. At the same time, under the influence of theImpressionist,Post-Impressionist, andFauvist pictures he saw in Paris museums and commercial galleries, he gave up the usually sombre palette he had employed at home.

Maturity

The four years of his first stay in the French capital are often considered Chagall’s best phase. Representative works areSelf-Portrait with Seven Fingers (1912),I and the Village (1911),Hommage à Apollinaire (1911–12),Calvary (1912),The Fiddler (1912), andParis Through the Window (1913). In these pictures Chagall was already essentially the artist he would continue to be for the next 60 years. His colours, although occasionally thin, were beginning to show the characteristic complexity andresonance he would eventually achieve. The often whimsical figurative elements, frequently upside down, are distributed on the canvas in an arbitrary fashion, producing an effect that sometimes resembles a film montage and suggests the inner space of a reverie. The general atmosphere of these works can imply a Yiddish joke, a Russianfairy tale, or a vaudeville turn. Often the principal character is the romantically handsome, curly-haired young painter himself. Memories of childhood and of Vitebsk were major sources of imagery for Chagall during this period.

After exhibiting in the annual ParisSalon des Indépendants andSalon d’Automne, Chagall had his first solo show in Berlin in 1914, in the gallery of theModernist publicationDer Sturm, and he made a strong impression on GermanExpressionist circles. After visiting the exhibition, he went on to Vitebsk, where he was stranded by the outbreak ofWorld War I. Working for the moment in a relativelyrealistic style, Chagall painted local scenes and a series of studies of old men; examples of the series areThe Praying Jew (orThe Rabbi of Vitebsk, 1914) andJew in Green (1914). In 1915 he marriedBella Rosenfeld, the daughter of a wealthy Vitebsk merchant; among the many paintings in which she appears from this date onward are the depiction of flying lovers entitledBirthday (1915–23) and the high-spirited, acrobaticDouble Portrait with a Glass of Wine (1917).

Britannica Quiz

Artists, Painters, & Architects

Chagall was initially enthusiastic about theRussian Revolution of October 1917; he became commissar for art in the Vitebsk region and launched into ambitious projects for a localart academy and museum. But after two and a half years of intense activity, marked by increasingly bitteraesthetic and political quarrels with the faculty of the art academy, he gave up and moved to Moscow. There he turned his attention for a while to the stage, producing the sets and costumes for plays by the Jewish writerSholem Aleichem and murals for theKamerny Theatre. In 1922 Chagall left Russia for good, going first to Berlin, where he discovered that a large number of the pictures he had left behind in 1914 had disappeared. In 1923, this time with a wife and daughter, he settled once again in Paris.

Chagall had learned the techniques ofengraving while in Berlin. Through his friend Cendrars he met the Paris art dealer and publisherAmbroise Vollard, who in 1923 commissioned him to create a series ofetchings to illustrate a special edition ofNikolay Gogol’s novelDead Souls, and thus launched Chagall on a long career as aprintmaker. During the next three years, Chagall executed 107 full-page plates for the Gogol book. By then Vollard had a new idea: an edition of French poetJean de La Fontaine’sFables, with coloured illustrations resembling 18th-century prints. Chagall prepared 100gouaches for reproduction, but it soon became evident that his colours were too complex for theprinting processenvisaged. He switched to black-and-white etchings, completing the plates in 1931. By this time Vollard had come up with still another commission: a series of etchings illustrating theBible. Chagall had completed 66 plates by 1939, whenWorld War II and the death of Vollard halted work on the project; with the project renewed in the postwar years, Chagall eventually completed 105 plates. The Paris publisher E. Tériade, picking up where Vollard had left off, issuedDead Souls in 1948 (with 11 more etchings for the chapter headings, making 118 in all),La Fontaine’sFables in 1952 (with two cover etchings, making 102 in all), and the Bible in 1956. Along with these muchdelayed ventures, in the 1920s Chagall also produced a number of smaller collections of engravings, many single plates, and an impressive quantity of coloured lithographs and monotypes.

Get Unlimited Access

Try Britannica Premium for free and discover more.

Subscribe

During the 1920s and early ’30s, Chagall painted fewer large canvases, and his work became more obviously poetical and popular with the general public. Examples areBride and Groom with Eiffel Tower (1928) andThe Circus (1931). With Hitler’s rise to power, however, and the growing threat of a new world conflict, the artist began to have visions of a very different sort, which are reflected in the powerfulWhite Crucifixion (1938). In this painting, Jewish and Christian symbols areconflated in a depiction of German Jews terrorized by a Nazi mob; the crucified Christ at the center of thecomposition is wrapped in a tallith, a Jewishprayer shawl.

Throughout this interwar period Chagall traveled extensively, working in Brittany in 1924, in southernFrance in 1926, in Palestine in 1931 (as preparation for the Bible etchings), and, between 1932 and 1937, in Holland, Spain, Poland, and Italy. In 1931 his autobiography,My Life, was published. His reputation as a modern master was confirmed by a large retrospective exhibition in 1933 at the Kunsthalle in Basel, Switzerland.