Hello, my name is Paul Priestley. Welcome to Artist in School, the home of art
history for young people and interested amateurs. Today we are going to look at the Russian
artist, Marc Chagall. Wonderful painter, the painter of love. Once described as a ‘poet with the wings
of a painter’ Marc Chagall often said he preferred the company of poets to that of
painters. He disliked art theories and the restrictions
of art movements, so he never became a surrealist or a cubist painter. As you’ll see in his paintings, the central
theme of Chagall’s work is love, simple as that. As the artist himself said, ‘In life, just
as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and
art, the colour of love.’ Marc Chagall, an orthodox Jew, was born in
Vitebsk, Russia on the 7th of July 1887 as Moshe Segal. He was the eldest of 9 children. His father worked for a fish merchant, his
mother ran a grocery shop and rented out small wooden huts built onto the side of the family
house for extra income. As a boy he attended the Jewish primary school
and the Municipal School in Vitebsk. Later in life he described Vitebsk as ‘a
strange town, an unhappy town, a boring town,’ yet it features in many of his paintings. At the age of 18 Chagall started at the art
school of the painter Yehuda Pen, but he left after 2 months to work as a re-toucher for
a Vitebsk photographer. Later, in 1907 Chagall moved, without a permit,
to Saint Petersburg to take up an apprenticeship as a sign writer. He lived there in great poverty, but soon
joined the painting school of the Imperial Society for the Promotion of the Arts. 1909 brought yet another move, when Chagall
joined the more liberal Svanseva Art school. Here he studied with Leon Bakst - the Russian
painter, who revolutionised theatrical costume and set design. Bakst introduced Chagall to more modern approaches
of artistic expression, and crucially, taught him to use colour as a basic element of his
work. Despite spending time studying, Chagall still
found time to visit his family in Vitebsk. On one memorable visit he met Bella Rosenfeld,
the daughter of a wealthy jeweller who, 6 years later, would become his wife. After receiving a grant in 1910 Chagall moved
to Paris, where he changed his name to the more French sounding Marc Chagall and in 1911
moved into his own studio in La Ruche, the legendary Parisian artist colony. It was here he became friends with the artists
Ferdinand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani and Chiam Soutine. The following year Chagall exhibited 3 paintings
at the Salon des Independents in Paris; The first is a painting called ‘The Drunkard’
– note the reverse perspective, the flattened and disjointed objects and clashing complementary
colours. The second painting, ‘Dedicated to my Fiancé’
was based very much around his Jewish- Russian background and of course Bella. The third painting was, ‘Russia, Asses and
Others’ – notice how the contrast between the real and the unreal causes reality to
appear miraculous, or even dreamlike. Later in 1914 Chagall held his first one man
exhibition in the Berlin Gallery, Der Sturm. Later that year he got a 3 month visa to visit
Russia, but couldn’t return to Paris because of the outbreak of the First World War. On 25th of July 1915 Chagall married Bella
Rosenfelt in Vitebsk. Shortly afterwards they moved to Saint Petersburg,
where Chagall worked as a Clerk in the Press Department for the War Economy Office, in
lieu of military service. Chagall exhibited, in 1916, 45 paintings at
the exhibition of the Avant Garde artists group, the Jack of Diamonds in Moscow. Following the October Revolution of 1917,
he was offered the post of Head of Fine Arts in the newly created Ministry of Culture,
but he declined the appointment and returned with Bella and his daughter, to Vitebsk. By 1919 Chagall had set up the Vitebsk School
of Fine Arts with artists Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky as part of the teaching team. But things didn’t go well and after numerous
arguments about artistic direction, Chagall upped and left. Shortly afterwards, Malevich renamed the Art
School the Suprematist Academy. The abstraction of Suprematist was not something
that appealed to Chagall. Two years later, in 1922, Chagall left Russia
for good. He lived in Berlin for a few months, before
moving on to Paris. He returned to his old studio in la Ruche,
but all the paintings he had left before the War had disappeared. He hated the fact that part of his personal
history, which the paintings represented, had gone, so for most of the next 3 years
he painted replicas and new versions. During these years he also received a number
of commissions including one for 19 gouaches on the theme of the circus. His reputation was growing. So much so that in 1931 he received an invitation
from the mayor of Tel Aviv to spend time in Palestine. Chagall spent 3 months there with his wife
and daughter Ida. The country and its history inspired him to
start a series of etchings on a Biblical theme, but the project was not completed and published
until 1956. But by 1933 life for Jews, particularly in
Germany, was becoming increasingly difficult. Later that year a number of Chagall’s paintings
were publicly burnt by the Nazis, outside of the Mannheim Art Gallery’s exhibition
on Cultural Bolshevism. During the next couple of years, Chagall managed
to visit Poland and Italy, but pressure on Jews in Europe was increasing. In 1937, on the orders of the Nazi regime,
all Chagall’s works were removed from German museums. Three of these paintings were shown in the
notorious Degenerate Art Exhibition alongside other confiscated art works by internationally
famous artists. 1938 saw Chagall became a French citizen. Shortly after the outbreak of the Second World
War, Chagall moved his family to the relative safety of the South of France. The following year Varian Fry, the director
of the American Emergency Rescue Committee visited Chagall in France. He brought with him an invitation from the
Museum of Modern Art in New York for Chagall and his family to come to the United States. Shortly afterwards, the Chagall’s moved
to Marseilles before setting sail for the United States. On the 23rd of June 1941, the same day Germany
invaded Russia, Chagall and his family arrived in New York. In New York Chagall met a number of exiled
artists including, Piet Mondrian and the art dealer, Pierre Matisse, the son of artist
Henri Matisse. Pierre Matisse, organised Chagall’s first
exhibition in America, in New York November 1941, at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New
York. In 1944 Chagall’s wife Bella fell ill with
a viral infection. She was taken to a small local hospital that
lacked the facilities and expertise to treat her. Bella died just 36 hours after her arrival. Chagall was heartbroken. Chagall painted nothing for next 6 months. Ida, Chagall’s daughter, was so worried
about how lonely and morose Chagall had become, she employed a housekeeper, a young English
woman named Virginia Haggard to look after him. She was 28 years his junior and spoke French. She tidied his rooms, cooked and brought him
flowers to paint. Eventually, she became his companion and later
his lover. The relationship lasted until 1951. In the late 1940’s a number of retrospective
exhibitions were held of Chagall’s work with shows in New York, London, Zurich and
Bern in Switzerland. They were all hugely successful. But Chagall longed to return to France, and
in 1948 he left America for good. Although he was now internationally famous,
his childhood timidity had never left him. Chagall avoided the limelight, and wasn’t
really interested in fame. In 1950 he moved to Vence in the South of
France and intermittently met up with Matisse and Picasso both of whom had studios nearby. His relationship with Pablo Picasso was problematic,
at times he was a friend other times very much a rival. Chagall could be quite cynical, once joking,
“What a genius, that Picasso, it’s a pity he doesn’t paint.” Picasso could be equally scathing although
he did once say of Chagall, “I don’t know where he gets those images . . . . He must
have an angel in his head.” In 1951 Virginia left him, but the following
year Chagall met Valentina Brodsky who he married on 12th of July. Their marriage gave him new energy and in
June of that year he visited Chartres Cathedral to study medieval stained glass window painting. The new medium inspired him and in 1959 he
created stained glass windows for the north apse of Metz Cathedral in France. The following year he was commissioned to
create windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew University Clinic in Jerusalem. Shortly after their completion, together with
the painter Oscar Kokoschka, he was awarded the Erasmus Prize of the European Culture
Foundation in Copenhagen. 1964 saw Chagall complete the windows of the
Good Samaritan for the memorial to John D Rockefeller Junior and the Peace window for
the United Nations building in New York. Chagall travelled to Jerusalem in 1969 to
take part in the inauguration of the new building for the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for
which he created the floor and wall mosaics. In 1970, 50 years after he left Russia, Chagall
travelled with his wife to Moscow and Leningrad at the invitation of the Soviet cultural minister. He was reunited with his two sisters, who
he had not seen for fifty years, but refused to go back to the Vitebsk. During 1975 Chagall produced 50 lithographs
illustrating Shakespeare's The Tempest and also produced several large canvases with
mythological biblical themes. Two years later, at the age of 90 Chagall
was awarded France’s highest honour, the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. During the following years, Chagall completed
stain glassed windows for St. Stephen's Church in Mainz and the American Windows for The
Art Institute in Chicago. In 1977 the French president opened an exhibition
of Chagall’s work in the Louvre in Paris, the first time a living artist had received
the honour. Marc Chagall died at his home in St Paul de
Vence at the age of 97, on the 28th of March 1985. He was a complex man, sometimes naive sometimes
sophisticated, shy and brazen, simple and shrewd, and could be stingy but also very
generous. He wanted to be regarded as a universal painter
not just a Jewish artist. However, some critics accused him of repeating
himself, possibly for financial reasons. But as Chagall himself said, ‘Poets always
use the same letters, but out of them they constantly recreate different words.’ Thank you for watching, I hope you have really
enjoyed learning about Marc Chagall, a wonderful artist. If you have, then please subscribe to my channel
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