Marc Chagall Biography - Infos for Sellers and Buyers

Marc Chagall

Witebsk 1887 - Saint-Paul-de-Vence 1985

The artist Marc Chagall is born on July 7, 1887 in Witebsk, Belarus. Chagall attends the private Swansewa Art School in St. Petersburg from 1907 to 1910. He travels to Paris in 1910, where he becomes acquainted with contemporary writers and artists. Herwarth Walden organizes his first one-man show in the Berlin gallery "Der Sturm" in 1914. He returns to Witebsk where the outbreak of World War I comes quite surprising.
Marc Chagall is appointed commissioner of fine arts in Witebsk in 1918, founding his own art academy the same year, with El Lissitzky and Kasimir Malewitsch, among others, as teachers. Due to disputes with Malewitsch, Chagall leaves the academy in 1919. He goes to Moscow where he works as a costume and stage designer at the Jewish theater, additionally, he teaches drawing classes at the colony for war orphans "Malachowka" near Moscow.
Chagall leaves Russia for good in 1922, living for a short time in Berlin and finally settles in Paris as of 1923, where he gets his first remittance work from the art dealer Ambroise Vollard for a book illustration project the same year. He illustrates Nikolai Gogol's novel "Die toten Seelen" (The Dead Souls). As of 1925 Marc Chagall works on illustrations for La Fontaine's fables. His bible illustrations are made between 1931 and 1939 as well as of 1952.
Marc Chagall's artistic oeuvre is proof of a great pleasure in telling stories in poetic images in beautiful colors, creating an own timeless and poetic world. Chagall's main source of inspiration is Russia's rich stock of folk art, Jewish mysticism and legends. He combines all this with dream visions. Certain motifs and metaphors are recurring, such as the loving couple, the cock or the Jewish figure Schtetl.
Besides paintings, Chagall executes numerous cycles of etchings as well as lithographs. Even though Marc Chagall began dealing with lithography only after returning to Paris, he attains a certain mastery within a very short time.
He receives numerous remittance works for public buildings between 1950 and 1970, designing, for instance, glass windows for the cathedral in Metz, for the cathedral Notre-Dame in Reims, the synagogue of the Hadassah university hospital in Jerusalem and St. Stephen's Church in Mainz. He executes a ceiling for the cupola above the auditorium of the Paris Opéra Garnier as of 1963. As of 1964 he begins with murals in the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Marc Chagall resides in the USA during World War II as of 1941. The first comprehensive retrospective exhibition takes place at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946. The artist returns to Paris in 1947 and settles in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 1950, where he dies on March 28, 1985. Chagall retains his creative strength up into an old age.