Marc Chagall painted murals for Moscow's Jewish theatre

Person: Marc Chagall
Lived: 1887–1985
Field: Painting
From: Russian-French

The story

Marc Chagall was born near Vitebsk in 1887 and, after the Russian Revolution, served as commissar of arts in his home town, where he founded a people's art school. In 1920, after clashing with the abstract artists who had taken over the school, he moved to Moscow, where he was invited to design for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theatre, which was to open in early 1921 with plays by the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem.

Chagall first designed sets and costumes for three short Sholem Aleichem plays, then turned to the walls of the tiny auditorium, later nicknamed "Chagall's Box". He created a series of large murals for it. The main panel, Introduction to the Jewish Theatre, was about 9 feet tall and 24 feet long, filled with dancers, fiddlers, acrobats and farm animals drawn from the Jewish life of his childhood. Facing it were panels of muses inspired by Jewish tradition, such as Literature as a Torah scribe and Music as a fiddler. One critic of the time called the work Hebrew jazz in paint. His sets and costumes helped give the Yiddish theatre its distinctive, dreamlike atmosphere.

Chagall fell out with the theatre's management and was never paid for the murals, and he soon left Russia for good. In 1937, as political pressure and antisemitism grew under Stalin, the theatre took the murals down, rolled them up and stored them under the stage. Eleven years later the theatre was closed, and the paintings were moved to the State Tretyakov Gallery for safekeeping.

When Chagall returned to the Soviet Union in 1973, for the first time in more than fifty years, he was able to see the murals again. He had believed they were destroyed, and he signed them then. They were restored in 1989, in the era of glasnost, and have since been shown in New York, Chicago, Germany, Finland and elsewhere.

The murals are considered a landmark in the history of the theatre and a forerunner of his later monumental works for the Paris Opera and the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Having survived decades rolled up in storage, they remain a vivid record of the Yiddish theatre of revolutionary Moscow.