Marc Chagall

There’s hardly someone that hasn’t seen that whimsical and peculiar picture of no less distinctive painter as Marc Chagall. I mean his famous one “Over the town”. It represents enough aspects to maintain the life priorities of the artist himself and as every work of him it shines with love, imagery and the flying nature of thought. The thought of one of the foremost artists of the 20th Century.

Marс Zakharovich Сhagall, was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Belorussia. His birth coincided with conflagration in the suburbs like a signal of appearance of the new significant fate that would substitute the ruins of old art with new aspiration. His family couldn’t fully appreciate all the capacity of their amazing boy. Young Chagall was taught with love for religion. Later a lot of biblical undertones would take their place on master’s canvases. Chagall left the Jewish elementary school and school of painting in Vitebsk and moved to St Petersburg. Believing his brushwork’s his real mission, in 1907 Chagall entered the school directed by Nikolai Roerich. There came some hopes and myths dethroned about it and he transferred to private education. Wherever he went he realized how individual and unlike was his manner of drawing, how important was the brush as the way to oppose the political oppression and the art of so-called avant-gardists. Cause he supposed the scientific method of art approach to be worthless and his ideas could find their approval in Paris where he met leading poets and painters. Chagall always stressed the importance of Paris for his development. But despite his late recognition in Russia he often repeated ‘my motherland is in my soul’.

Chagall contributed to the best world exhibitions, participated in them and in 1914 in Vitebsk he married Bella Rosenberg who would become an inspiration for many of his works, would predominate in the foreground of all his life. He was a founder, director, and the most popular teacher at the Vitebsk Academy. Desiring to express all points of view on art, he was ousted by the Malevich fraction and left Vitebsk for Moscow where many collaboration would wait for him. He left Russia.. settled fruitfully in Paris.. looked for shelter in the United States.. His palette and gaudy colouring expresses that multi-coloured period and the multiple character of all his living.. One thing, the death of Bella stopped Chagall's creativity for many months. Despite his sorrows he remained an optimist, and with every brushstroke, every green, blue, or purple face of his violinists, every rooster and flying cow…every head detached from body as the manifestation of soul’s and thought’s omnipotence makes senseless every attempt to condemn the painter for the lack of realism. An important factor in Chagall's recovery as a painter was his second wife, Valentine Brodskii. She encouraged him to undertake large artistic projects (the decoration of the ceiling of the Operas). He also explored the technique of stained-glass, designing windows for many establishments of world value. In the West, Chagall had countless exhibitions and retrospectives. In Russia, after many years of silence and disregard he was cautiously but identified as the painter. Finally his native town penetrated into his extasic love for its crooked fences and mournful houses thanking him posthumously with opening a Chagall Museum in Vitebsk.

The person going ahead with the face turned back is the key image in the art of Marc Chagall and it’s not surprising in his flower of age he devoted himself to writing memoirs, created documentary-poetic life description that reflects his formation as such a distinguished man with his unique fate. Written in French and read by me in Russian version it showed however the artistry of his any style. His pictures’re like words: every essential message has the following flashing energy like the array of daubs merged and guessed precisely makes its general impression. Chagall wastes no space as every square centimetre of his canvas is filled with vibrant and powerful colours. We can’t know the exact sense concentrated in picture but what’s the most magic is revealing from under the hand of what person such vivant and completed creations had fluttered. I think when you realize the things touched you’re really marvelous it’s what makes you a die-hard fan and nothing more can’t prevent you from keeping the secret an artist shared with you through time and space. The pictures of Marc Chagall to my mind are capable to be regarded as the very equivalent of pepole's spirit.