- Person
- Marc Chagall
- Lived
- 1887–1985
- Field
- Painting
- From
- Russian-French
The story
Marc Chagall grew up in a Jewish family in and around Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, at a time when more than half the town's 66,000 residents were Jewish. Jews were restricted in where they could live and study, and Chagall had needed a borrowed permit simply to enter Saint Petersburg to attend art school. He went on to Paris in 1910, returned home in 1914, and married Bella Rosenfeld of Vitebsk in 1915.
After the Russian Revolution, Chagall was appointed commissar of arts for Vitebsk in the summer of 1918. He used the post to found the People's Art College, known as the Academy, and an art museum in the city. The school officially opened on 28 January 1919. Tuition was free, and its students, about 120 of them, were mostly young, poor and Jewish. The museum was planned to share a building with the school, giving students examples to learn from and introducing the townspeople to the history of art.
Chagall wanted a revolutionary school open to every artistic style. He brought in his own first teacher, Yehuda Pen, known for scenes of Jewish life, and invited El Lissitzky to teach graphics and architecture. Lissitzky in turn brought Kazimir Malevich, who arrived in November 1919. Under their influence many students turned to abstract Suprematism and formed a group called UNOVIS, which came to dominate the school.
In 1920 Chagall left the school he had founded and moved to Moscow to work for the State Jewish Chamber Theatre. The school continued for two more years, until its funding ended in 1922.
The creation of the school and museum helped spark what became known as the Vitebsk Renaissance, making the provincial town one of the well-known avant-garde centres of the early 20th century. Its brief history was celebrated in a 2018 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Jewish Museum in New York. For young people from poor and Jewish families, it offered a rare opening into serious art.
Why it matters
Chagall's school brought free professional art education to a provincial city and to students who had long been excluded from it.
About Marc Chagall
One of the 20th century's most beloved painters; pioneer of modernism rooted in Jewish folk life.
More about Marc Chagall
- Chagall's America Windows celebrate religious freedomMarc Chagall created the America Windows for the Art Institute of Chicago as a tribute to the US Bicentennial and America's commitment to cultural and religious freedom.
- Marc Chagall designed a cathedral window at the age of 90Marc Chagall designed a stained-glass window for Chichester Cathedral at the age of 90, inspired by Psalm 150, and it was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in 1978.
- Marc Chagall's twelve windows for a Jerusalem hospitalMarc Chagall spent two years creating twelve stained-glass windows of the tribes of Israel for the synagogue of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, installed in February 1962.
- Marc Chagall gave France his Biblical Message paintingsMarc Chagall donated 17 large paintings and 38 gouaches of his Biblical Message series to France, which built a national museum for them in Nice, opened on his birthday in 1973.
- Marc Chagall painted the ceiling of the Paris OperaOn 23 September 1964 Marc Chagall's new ceiling for the Paris Opera was unveiled: nearly 2,400 square feet of canvas paying tribute to great composers, dancers and actors.
- Marc Chagall filled every window of a Kent village churchAll Saints Church in Tudeley, Kent, is the only church in the world with all twelve of its windows by Marc Chagall, installed between 1967 and 1985.
- Marc Chagall made the Peace window at the United NationsIn 1964 Marc Chagall created Peace, a stained-glass window at the United Nations in New York honouring Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who died on a peace mission in 1961.
- Chagall's Mainz windows became a sign of reconciliationFrom 1978, aged 91, Marc Chagall created windows for St Stephan's church in Mainz as a sign of Jewish-Christian friendship, in a city once called the capital of European Jewry.
- Marc Chagall painted murals for Moscow's Jewish theatreFor the 1921 opening of Moscow's State Jewish Chamber Theatre, Marc Chagall painted huge murals of dancers, fiddlers and acrobats that became a landmark in theatre history.
- Marc Chagall preserved a vanished Jewish world in paintMarc Chagall's paintings of Vitebsk, its fiddlers, rabbis and wooden houses, became the most important visual record of East European Jewish life, and inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Sources
- Marc Chagall Wikipedia
- Chagall the Revolutionary Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.