Chagall, Marc.
Works of the artist.
(Vitebsk, 1887 - Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1985) French painter of Russian origin. He was one of the most important artists of the avant-garde movement and his work resonates with fantasies and dreams. [+]
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Chagall, Marc
(Vitebsk, 1887 - Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1985) French painter of Russian origin. He was one of the most important artists of the avant-garde movement and his work resonates with fantasies and dreams.Born in a small Russian village, his artistic interests took him to Paris in 1910, where he reached artistic maturity. He returned to Russia in 1914 and took an active part in the cultural renewal of his country, but his disputes with Kazimir Malevich and the revolutionary demands of linking political commitment and artistic work led him to travel to Germany in 1924. His Jewishness would later force him to make a pilgrimage to France and the United States, which would bring him back to France for good at the end of the Second World War.
His assimilation of the two leading avant-garde movements, the Fauvism of Matisse and the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, is evident in the paintings he produced in his early Parisian years.
From the outset, however, these influences merged with his own personal experiences, deeply rooted in his native Vitebsk and the fact that he belonged to the Jewish community. It is from this dual condition that Chagall drew his repertoire of images, a limited iconographic vocabulary to which he remained faithful throughout his life. His painting is the embodiment of a memory that fuses personal memories with the imagery of Russian folk folklore and constitutes an indissoluble unity between reality and fantasy, between symbolic logic and the irrationality of the subconscious.
Chagall's work is notable for being a blend of avant-garde and folk tradition, and possesses the brilliant chromaticism emancipated from reality which he learned from Fauvism, and which will be a dominant feature of his entire output. The apparent anarchy of his images, mixed without a clear spatial and narrative logic to justify the superimpositions, the heterogeneity of sizes and the transgression of the laws of physics, are nevertheless subject to a careful radial composition that follows the teachings of Cubism; these are evident in the design of lines that articulate the various images with each other and establish connections between the figures in the foreground and the background.
The references to the peasant world in which he spent his childhood, as well as the plant motif in the foreground, are some of the images he repeated most consistently throughout his oeuvre. All of them have the world of his childhood as a common reference point and Chagall makes use of them with the arbitrariness of reverie and nostalgia.
On other occasions, the illogical appearance of his images derives from the simple transcription into visual language of common expressions from spoken language, which Chagall takes up and visualizes as a way of revealing psychic experiences.
Chagall constructs a world of associations through which he wishes to reveal the secret message of things, but his gaze is closer to childish naivety, which disregards the immediate functionality of objects and logical coherence, than to the search for concrete revelations. Hence his refusal to join the Surrealist movement despite the insistence and praise of André Breton. The existence of images that coexist outside rational logic is for him a real fact and he accepts it as something consubstantial to life itself, not as the product of a refined intellectual game or a journey into the depths of the unconscious.
During his long career, he also worked in the field of illustration and experimented with all kinds of media such as ceramics, relief and mosaics. He also designed the staging of various plays and operas, and during the last thirty years of his life he devoted himself intensively to the design of stained-glass windows, including those for Metz Cathedral and the synagogue of the Hebrew University Hadassah Medical Centre in Jerusalem.
