Marc Chagall preserved a vanished Jewish world in paint

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

The story

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887 near Vitebsk, the eldest of nine children in a poor Jewish family, and grew up steeped in the Hasidic culture of the town, where more than half the people were Jewish. As a boy he felt at every step, he later wrote, that people made him aware he was a Jew. In his autobiography, My Life, he described realising as a young man that the Jewish traditions of his childhood were fast disappearing and that he needed to document them.

He trained first with the Vitebsk painter Yehuda Pen, then in Saint Petersburg under Léon Bakst. Even after moving to Paris in 1910, he kept painting from memory the snowy streets, wooden houses, rabbis and fiddlers of home, in a style of floating figures and bold colour that was entirely his own.

Those memories became a lifelong visual language. His 1912 painting The Fiddler is cited as an inspiration for the musical Fiddler on the Roof. The art critic Robert Hughes called him the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century, and the art historian Michael J. Lewis called Chagall the most important visual artist to have borne witness to the world of East European Jewry, and the public witness of a now vanished civilisation.

That civilisation was destroyed. Vitebsk was devastated by the Germans in the Second World War, and little of the wooden town Chagall had painted survived. According to one historian's account, only 118 of its 240,000 people survived the war. Chagall, who had escaped Nazi-occupied France in 1941, lived to see the world of his childhood wiped out.

Chagall's paintings, now in museums around the world, preserve something of the life that was lost. His rabbis, fiddlers and village streets keep the Jewish towns of Eastern Europe alive in art long after the towns themselves were gone.