Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall, born Moishe Shagal on 6 July 1887 (24 June in the old calendar), died 28 March 1985. He was a Russian and French artist with Jewish ancestry. An early modernist, he was linked to the École de Paris and several major art movements, producing work in many formats: paintings, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries, and fine art prints. He was born into a Jewish family near Vitebsk, now in Belarus but then part of the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement. Before World War I, he moved between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin, developing a personal modern art style rooted in Eastern European and Jewish folklore. During the war, he stayed in Vitebsk and Petrograd, becoming a leading Russian artist and a member of the modernist avant-garde. He founded the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and the People’s Art School. After the Bolshevik Revolution, he worked in and near Moscow under difficult conditions, then left for Paris in 1923. During World War II, he fled occupied France for the United States, living in New York City for seven years before returning to France in 1948. Art critic Robert Hughes called him “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century.” Art historian Michael J. Lewis noted that Chagall was seen as “the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists” and, for decades, “the world’s pre-eminent Jewish artist.” He created stained-glass windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, the Fraumünster in Zürich, the United Nations, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also painted large-scale works, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. In Paris, he experienced modernism’s “golden age,” synthesizing Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, with Fauvism’s influence leading toward Surrealism. Yet throughout, he remained “most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native Vitebsk.” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”

**Early life and education**

**Early life**

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887 into a Jewish family in Lyozna, near Vitebsk, or possibly in Vitebsk itself. At his birth, Vitebsk had about 66,000 residents, over half of them Jewish. A city of churches and synagogues, artist Ilya Repin called it the “Russian Toledo,” after the cosmopolitan Spanish city. Because most buildings were wood, little survived World War II. Chagall was the eldest of nine children. The family name Shagal is a variant of Segal, typically borne by a Levitic family in Jewish communities. His father, Khatskl (Zachar) Shagal, worked for a herring merchant; his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from home. His father carried heavy barrels, earning 20 roubles a month (the Russian average was 13). Chagall wrote: “Day after day, winter and summer, at six o’clock in the morning, my father got up and went off to the synagogue. … Hellish work, the work of a galley-slave. … There was always plenty of butter and cheese on our table.”

The Jewish population’s main income came from clothing manufacture sold across the Russian Empire, as well as furniture and agricultural tools. From the late 18th century until World War I, the Imperial government confined Jews to the Pale of Settlement, covering modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, and Latvia—roughly the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. This created Jewish market-villages (shtetls) with their own institutions. Chagall wrote as a boy: “I felt at every step that I was a Jew—people made me feel it.” During a pogrom, he recalled: “The street lamps are out. I feel panicky, especially in front of butchers’ windows. … My death would be futile. I so wanted to live.” When asked “Jew or not?” by pogromniks, he denied being Jewish, and they let him go. Most early-life details come from his autobiography, *My Life*. He described the strong influence of Hasidic Judaism on his art, realizing the traditions of his youth were fading and needed documenting. Since the 1730s, Vitebsk had been a center of that culture, rooted in Kabbalah.