Marc Chagall ~ 1915 -1947

This is some thing I dig the most about the internet.  In a few clicks I can scroll down and look at Marc Chagall's body of work.  And then review, by decade, what his subjects were and the color pallet he chose.  Are they moody or vibrant colors?  Are they introspective or are the pieces declarative suggestions about human kind.

His early work was profound.  And he generated quite a lot of work that was exceptionally good.  They were skillfully done.  Even though they had a dreamy quality they were not lazy abstractions.  They were created with great thought and care.  The mediums, the textures and the subjects reflect the nature and importance of family life, community, faith and love.  It is as though Chagall is holding his heart in his hand for everyone else to see.  And that is a very brave thing for an artist to do.

Yes, it is all there.
Transparent
joyful, gasping for air or
letting go of everything
on such a deep level that all that matters
cannot even touch the ground.

Marc Chagall is an historical commentator.  We see humanity in the context of his work and the heartache that is often expressed is so intense it cannot be denied. It is like catching air in the middle of a breath and then being paralyzed and not being able to breathe again.

After breaking away for a bit and reading his bio and then looking through his body of work; I find it interesting that now I hardly need to see a date to know when he created his paintings.

The work he did while he was in Russia with the love of his life, his wife Bella Rosenfeld was warm and inviting.  Its peaceful even though these works were painted during WWI and during a time when antisemitism was severe.  And yet...

Look at these painted from 1915-1920.
Window at the Dacha 1915         The Poet Reclining 1915
     

The Birthday 1915                                         

Bella and Ida by the Window 1916
                                                                                                                                                  

The Blue House 1917
 

Cemetery Gates                                                                                                                                        

      Peasant Life 1917

                                             

      
 The Promenade 1917-1918
 
 Synagogue 1917                 Grey Lovers 1917
   

The world was at war.  He had visited countries that were now at war.  He was living in Russia.  And yet there is a small town, out in the middle of way out there Russia and still in stead of seeing a bleak depiction of life it is rather - normal and peaceful.
Its as though his canvas and the world he was creating was a refuge to the harsh realities of that time in history.  Maybe he struggled with keeping sane by focusing on the life of those in his family and his community.  I don't know.

But I do know that during a dark time, for vastly different reasons, I painted three canvases, three oil canvases that year and each was a central yellow flower as the subject with a rich but very dark earthy background.  It was all I could see that year.  I think I painted other things.  But yeah, why yellow flowers against a dark background?  And I rarely paint flowers.

Yellow Dahlia, Yellow Iris Petite and Yellow Iris Grande                                                                                                         

 

I tend to be drawn to artists who are reflected through their work: Whose work grows and changes like the branches of a great tree, sprawled in the midst of a grande expanse.  I like being able to see each turn in their lives, the bend of every bough and the broke out hollow in the belly of its twisted torso.  Because that is life.  It has joy and change and sorrow and sorting things out and making sense or going insane because of a suffering that could not be reconciled.  I think that is why an artist that are more formulaic doesn't interesting to me.  Because while the formula may be attractive on a wall, life is complex and constantly changing.  When I see life in a body of work I know that the artist is revealing something true about their life and the time in which they lived.  And that has always intrigued me. 

Chagall was offered a job to work for the Russian  Ministry as the Chief of Fine Arts Department but he said no.  He continued to study in Vitebsk until he left for Berlin for a one man show and then he and his wife and daughter left Berlin for Paris.  When the Nazi's occupied Paris the Chagall's were trapped.  But with some help they went to the United States in 1941 and there they stayed throughout the remainder of WWII.  Bella tragically died in 1944 of a virus.  And Chagall left for Paris in 1945.

I don't think during that time in our history, his life was like splattered grease hopping out of the frying pan and just barely missing the direct fire.  Maybe that is what the splintered reality that grows increasingly more interesting to him, comes from.

Here we see his work is changing dramatically.  Now the war is touching him, touching his family, removing his community.

Le Juif errant 1923-1925  

                                                                                                                                                                   The Peasant Life 1925          

  

Chagall Marriage to Bella  1914                                                                                                                  

                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                 

                                                                  Bella with White Collar 1917 

Time - The river without banks 1930-1939                  

                                                                                                                                                                   









Fallen Angel 1923-1947                                                                            

What the world had turned into and his feelings about its uncertainty are clearly visible in his work.

 A few months after the French succeeded in liberating Paris from Nazi occupation, with the help of the Allied armies, Chagall published a letter in a Paris weekly, "To the Paris Artists":

In recent years I have felt unhappy that I couldn't be with you, my friends. My enemy forced me to take the road of exile. On that tragic road, I lost my wife, the companion of my life, the woman who was my inspiration. I want to say to my friends in France that she joins me in this greeting, she who loved France and French art so faithfully. Her last joy was the liberation of Paris... Now, when Paris is liberated, when the art of France is resurrected, the whole world too will, once and for all, be free of the satanic enemies who wanted to annihilate not just the body but also the soul—the soul, without which there is no life, no artistic creativity.^[12]:101

 In 1945 Chagall went to go live with his daughter Ida, and her husband.  He met and had a romance with Virginia Haggard, daughter of author, Henry Rider Haggard.  They had a son, David McNeil in 1946 and their relationship lasted for seven years.
I could find only one painting from 1945.

    
The Wedding Lights 1945

I'll be adding a little more to this post but wanted to read it and fool with it awhile and decided to post it.

Marc Chagall has a huge body of work and lived a really interesting life so there is lots to write about.  I am discovering so much of his work that I haven't seen that I'm really enjoying the research.

Marc Chagall ~ The Early Years

As I began to read about Marc Chagall, nee Moishe Segal, I realized that my ancestors came from Russia.  Granted it is a very big place.  But I became curious.  While my ancestors left Russia in the late 1800's, could we have come from similar parts of the world?

I did some research and sent an email that included my ancestor's names and asked if they could tell me where my family was from.  I don't know if I'll get the answer from this site.  Or how many sites I'll need to check but now I want to know more, more than ever before.

Moishe Segal, Chagall, had a very simple upbringing with a good family and in a close knit Jewish community in Vitebsk.  He studied drawing and painting in the Yehuda Pen for free because of his daring manner of using colors.  Cool.

He was the eldest of nine children.  Everyone he was related to or could get to sit for him he drew and painted.  The images he created in those formative years remained a constant source of inspiration throughout the rest of his life.

In 1907, Marc Chagall went to Saint Petersburg.  He was 19 years old.  He was artistic and extremely poor and suffered from the severity of discrimination in Saint Petersburg.  The attitudes of people about revolution and culture and the avante-garde are reflected in his work.  He was influenced by the French fauvism and German expressionism and Italian futurism.  Though he lived and worked mostly in solitude.  Which is
cool.

He continued to study art for two more years at Zvantseva's School of drawing and painting and he was a student of Leon Bakst.   Leon Bakst encouraged him to go to Paris.

I find this intriguing....
In 1909 in Vitebsk he met Bella Rosenfeld and he wrote this, "...Her silence is mine, her eyes mine.  It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me; as if she has always watched over me, somewhere next to me, though I saw her for the very first time.  I knew this is she, my wife.  Her pale colouring, her eyes.  How big and round and black they are!  They are my eyes, my soul...""My Life."  In July 1915 they married and she would always be his first love, wife and muse.
One thing that strikes me is, "Her silence is mine,"

In 1910 Chagall received a scholarship which enabled him to go to Paris to study.  It was there that he took on his pseudonym, in the French manner, Marc Chagall.

He loved going to museums and dug Delacroix, Courbet, Cezanne, Gaugin, and van Gouch, among others.  And he got into the fauvist method where his colors began to sing.  He hung out with poets and writers and painters and he bathed in the new approaches to art, cubism, futurism and orphism.  His work took on a life of its own and he was very creative.


The Death. 1908
     

Holy Family. 1909

 

Birth. 1910
 

In 1914 he exhibited several of his canvases in an exhibit and this also included about 150 watercolors, in Berlin.  When we went back to visit his family WWI broke out and this delayed his return to Europe.  Bella's brother Jacob helped him to avoid recruitment in the army and to find a job at the Military Industrial Committee in Petrograd.  In 1918 he was offered the post of Chief of Fine Arts in Petrograd but he refused it and instead served as a representative of the arts in Vitebsk.  He was a good organizer and published an article titled, "Revolution in Art."

In 1920 Marc and Bella and their daughter Ida, who was born in 1916, moved to Moscow where Chagall participated in theatrical life by creating sets for performances.  Which is also pretty cool.
I did that for a time too.

He created nine monumental paintings on the walls and his work was not understood.  It was at this time that he was forced to leave the country.  For one year after his departure Bella and Ida lived in Berlin which became a shelter for emigrants from Russia and other countries.    He was hoping to make some money on selling his artwork at that exhibition in 1914 but he got screwed.  He only got back three paintings and a dozen watercolors and no money.  He was in Berlin and published a book called, "My Life."  He illustrated it himself.    At the end of the summer in 1923 he got a letter from an old friend in Paris telling him that he was now famous and he needed to come back.  Ambroise Vollard was waiting for him.  Though many of the paintings he had created had become lost he used sketches and did reproductions of Birthday, I and the Village, Over Vitebsk and others.

The Violinist. 1911-1914




To My Betrothed. 1911

 
Golgotha. 1912
 

Paris through the Window.1913


I have never looked at that many paintings of Chagall.  I am very familiar with the ones in the Art Institute.  But I am diggin' the way he gets that the canvas is a place where he can create and express what he feels that does not have to look exactly like the real world. 

At some point some one asked me how I would describe my work.  And I thought about it and said that it is an expression of something metaphysical, some thing about life that I feel.  And that I let the image develop, like a stream of consciousness becoming what it will be right there on the canvas.  I did not know about the German expressionist movement and I did not know about the Blue Rider Group or the Fauvists or much about Marc Chagall.  But all alone, in my solitude I would up being inspired by a world that I often could not understand and painting has been my way of expressing what it feels like.

As I find out more about these guys, it strikes me what that teacher from NYC said about my work.  About me being an Expressionist.  I had never heard of that before.  I'm feeling so at how at home with what I've been learning.  I don't mean that my work is equal to or similar to these guys that were in the "Degenerate Art: Fate of the Avante-Garde in Nazi Germay,"  but there are connections that I'm feeling that is so way cool.  Most of my life I've been reclusive and haven't had much to compare with.

So when I read how Chagall painted some canvases a second time because the first ones were lost, I could relate with that.  I painted some of mine twice for different reasons but yeah.  Like while I was experimenting and figuring out how to create and use glazes, I destroyed a canvas, Woman Waiting that I had worked on for about a year.  It was so disappointing that I could get the finish to look right and so I destroyed it and painted it again.  It looks different but its similar.

Woman Waiting
 

Later I painted Windhorse and gave it to my attorney and then missed it so much I referred to a picture of it and painted it again.  And when I painted Schroedinger's Cat and accidentally scraped a hole in the canvas and painted that one again.  In fact, now that I think about it, I also painted Moment of Truth twice.  The first time I painted it the image was so powerful, right off the bat and it came so easy that I thought, I need to do more.  I worked it too much and ruined it.  I cut it up with a knife and threw it in the fire pit and lit it on fire on my farm in Michigan.  Then, freed from its ghost I approached a canvas with this idea again and it too did not take as long as my paintings usually take.  Most of them take at least a year to paint.  This one only took two or three months.

Moment of Truth
 

I learned when I don't see any other part of the canvas that I want to change or that I think needs more work, then it is finished.  And then I sign it.  And wait and look at it in different lights and still I may change a little here and there.  Add a highlight or add some shading.... whatever it may need.  So its cool to read that Chagall painted images again that had once been lost.  Maybe more artists do this than I know of.  Maybe people don't like to admit doing a canvas twice.  I don't know.

Chagall ~ he knocks me out.

Marc Chagall ~ America Windows and Four Seasons Mosaic

I'm studying Marc Chagall today and beading.  It snowed again and it finally sounds like winter.  Snow is like this wonderful buffer that absorbs sound and hushes every thing.  I think that's why it is so much quieter in the winter and why I get so much writing done.  Less distractions.

I shoveled the driveway and threw some sesame seeds, apricots, and oats and an apple.  I always give my one special friend treats on the step.  She is such a sweetheart.

I'll be adding information, thoughts and images of Marc Chagall over the next couple of days.  I've always appreciated his work but didn't know that much about him.  His body of work is so vast that I'm going to break it up into sections.  Marc Chagall is still kickin'.  He may not be alive but he is very much still kickin'.

Now to get some more work done and then Marc Chagall.  Now that's what I call being in some good company.

When I think of Marc Chagall I think of the blue windows in the Chicago Art Institute and I was thinking he had created a mosaic in Chicago. So I did some research and found some images.
These are the stained glass windows in the art institute that have inspired and caused many people, including me to stop and stare.  They are so beautiful.



I actually found a good video on YouTube about the re-installation of the America Windows by Marc Chagall and though some of the people talking are a little stiff, being able to see the process of how these windows were created is way cool.

Here are the three panels.



This is one of my favorite places to go.  To see these windows.  There is nothing like seeing them in real life.  Walking into the area where they are and seeing the way the light comes through them.

And the Four Seasons Mosaic.  I love the idea of public art.  I'd really like to do a project, a mural or mosaic, out in the open, to share with people walking by.  Now that would be something, really would be something...

 

I used to go and look at it and walk all around it.  The video is somebody who walked around and took video of it.  I like the regular feeling I get from it.  The sounds of the city, no vocal descriptions.  What I dig is that the person takes their time and gets into viewing all of it.  I feel the same way whenever I go see it.
 
I've always wanted to create a mosaic.  Even before I saw this.  But after I saw this I was struck.  One of these days....

I've been thinking of collecting glass and breaking it and then finding a wall to put it on.  Yeah, no sense in waiting.  This spring, its on.