Important Notice

Lot 60

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in Vitebsk, Belarus, on 7 July, 1887. The oldest of nine children in a modest Hasidic Jewish family, Chagall developed a passion for art at an early age, copying images he found in books to learn drawing. Rather than following his father’s footsteps and undertaking a mercantile career, after his initial schooling, Chagall began his training in art at the studio-school of the painter Yehuda Pen.... Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in Vitebsk, Belarus, on 7 July, 1887. The oldest of nine children in a modest Hasidic Jewish family, Chagall developed a passion for art at an early age, copying images he found in books to learn drawing. Rather than following his father’s footsteps and undertaking a mercantile career, after his initial schooling, Chagall began his training in art at the studio-school of the painter Yehuda Pen.

When Pen’s instruction in academic portraiture failed to hold his interest, Chagall moved to St. Petersburg in 1906. Here, he studied at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts, and later apprenticed with Léon Bakst, one of the set and costume designers for the Ballets Russes (the Russian Ballet). It was also in St. Petersburg that Chagall had his first contact with French artists like Paul Gauguin and the avant-garde movements they represented. In 1910, the artist secured a scholarship and travelled to Paris, where he experienced the ‘golden age’ of modernism and came into contact with artists and intellectuals like Guillaume Apollinaire, Fernand Leger and Robert Delunay. The time Chagall spent in Paris greatly influenced his art, and it was there that the artist first used gouache and brightened his palette after being influenced by works of French artists that he saw at the galleries and museums he would visit.

Though his paintings continued to include scenes from his memories of Vitebsk and several Jewish motifs, they also began to include Parisian elements, particularly its landmark, the Eiffel Tower. These dreamlike works were often described as ‘supernatural’, and were to become a determining influence for many Surrealist painters.

In 1912 and 1913, Chagall exhibited a selection of his works at the Salon des Independents and the Salon d’Automne, and in 1914, he held his first solo exhibition in Berlin at the Galerie der Sturm belonging to the dealer Herwarth Walden. Following this exhibition, which was a runaway success, the artist returned to Vitebsk to marry his fiancé, Bella Rosenfeld. However, the First World Bar broke out soon after, and Chagall was forced to remain in Belarus.

While in Russia, the artist exhibited in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and came to be regarded as one of the country’s most prominent artists. As a member of the nation’s ‘modernist avant-garde’, in 1917, Chagall openly supported the October Revolution and was appointed Commissar of the Arts for Vitebsk, after declining the same position at the national level. He also founded the Vitebsk Arts College, which soon became one of Russia’s premier art schools at which artists like Pen and Kazimir Malevich taught.

In 1920, Chagall resigned as Commissar and moved to Moscow, where he worked as a designer with the State Jewish Chamber Theatre. During his time there, Chagall produced several works using vivid and strong colours, and drawing from multiple styles such as Futurism and Cubism in his unique artistic idiom. Two years later, following a period of depravation during the 1918 famine, Chagall applied for an exit visa to return to France with his family. It was while he was waiting for this visa to be granted that the artist wrote his autobiography, ‘My Life’.

After a brief stop in Berlin, Chagall moved to Paris in 1923, and started working for the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. A year later, the first retrospective of his work was held at the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert there. In 1926, his first United States exhibition was held at the Reinhardt Gallery in New York, and in 1927, he fame in Paris was validated when Maurice Raynal included Chagall in his book, ‘Modern French Painters’. In 1933, another major retrospective of his work took place at the Kunsthalle in Basel.

It was during this period that the artist traveled extensively in France and other countries, and produced some of his finest etchings as illustrations for various publications. Among these were a suite of works commissioned by Vollard to illustrate the Old Testament. Researched for over three years, these etchings led the artist to explore the history of the Jews in great depth, which included his travels in Palestine, a country that left a lasting impact on his oeuvre.

On Chagall’s return to France in 1935, he completed about a third of the 105 plates he had planned, and by 1939, when the Second World War began and Vollard died, he had finished 66. This epic series was only completed in 1956, when it was published by Edition Tériade.

During the war, Chagall’s ‘Jewish’ art was attacked in Germany and then in France, and as a Jew and a naturalized citizen of France, he faced discrimination and danger. Fleeing Paris, the artist took refuge first in Avignon, but soon realized he must escape from France, and traveled to New York in 1941 as part of a group of artists and intellectuals smuggled out of the country with false documents.

In New York, where his work was already known and for which had been awarded the Carnegie Prize in 1939, Chagall eventually settled in with the help of fellow émigrés and friends like Piet Mondrian and André Breton. The paintings that Chagall executed in America at this time, however, were mainly anxious scenes of war, and contemplations about the fate of his fellow Jews. The figure of Christ frequently appeared in these works as a symbol of martyrdom.

In New York, Matisse’s son Pierre became Chagall’s dealer, showing his work in major exhibitions in New York and Chicago. The artist was also commissioned to design the sets and costumes for a production of ‘Aleko’ at the New York Ballet Theatre in 1942, and for Igor Stravinsky’s ‘The Firebird’ in 1945.

A year after his wife’s death, Chagall became involved with Virginia Haggard McNeill, with whom he had his second child in 1946. The same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a survey exhibition of Chagall’s work spanning four decades, and a year later his works were shown at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, in Paris, where he had returned to live with his new family.

In 1948, after travelling around the continent, Chagall moved to Vence on the Côte d'Azur, not far from the studios of Matisse and Picasso. Although they were not close, it is reported that Picasso once said that “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour is...Some of the last things he's done in Vence convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has” (Francoise Gilot, ‘Life with Picasso’, 1989). In 1952, after Virginia left him, Chagall married his secretary Valentina Brodsky.

During his years in Vence, the artist experimented with several different materials including sculpture and ceramic, and worked on large scale murals, stained glass windows, tapestries and mosaics. Amongst his commissions were stained glass windows for the Metz Cathedral in 1958, a set of twelve monumental windows for the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1961, a painting for the ceiling of the Paris Opera in 1963, the ‘Peace’ window for the UN Building, New York, in 1964, and two grand murals for the Metropolitan Opera at the Lincoln Centre in New York. From the late 1960s to the late 1970s, Chagall created stained glass windows for several churches and cathedrals in Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The largest exhibition of Chagall’s work, including almost 500 pieces and opened by the French President, was held at the Grand Palais, Paris, in 1969-70. In 1973, the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall opened in Nice, and in 1985, the Royal Academy, London, and the Philadelphia Museum held a major retrospective of his work. In 1992, the Chagall family home in Vitebsk was converted into the Marc Chagall Museum, and there is another museum dedicated to his work in Kyushu, Japan.

The artist continued to work until his death on 28 March, 1985, in Vence.

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