Marc Chagall: The Complete Story
Marc Chagall was the artist of floating lovers, green fiddlers and flying cows, who turned the Jewish village of his childhood into a lifelong dream world. Across nearly eight decades he painted, and made stained glass, that glows with memory, folklore and love, in colors that seem lit from within.
He is hard to file. Part Cubist, part Surrealist, part folk artist, he floated above every movement the way his lovers float above the rooftops.
Born: Vitebsk, in present day Belarus, 1887
Known for: dreamlike scenes, Jewish folklore, stained glass
Died: Saint Paul de Vence, France, 1985, at 97
The village that never left him
Chagall grew up in a poor Hasidic Jewish family in Vitebsk. Its wooden houses, fiddlers, rabbis, goats and weddings filled his imagination forever. Even living in Paris, he painted that lost world over and over, as in I and the Village.
He did not paint it realistically. He painted it the way memory works, weightless, jumbled, glowing, with figures upside down and time collapsed.
Love, and the woman who floats
His great subject was love, above all his wife Bella. In painting after painting the two of them drift through the air, embracing, lighter than the houses below. Few artists have made romantic happiness look so convincing.
When Bella died suddenly in 1944, he stopped painting for months, and his work carried that grief afterward.
Fleeing the war
As a Jewish artist in occupied France, Chagall was in mortal danger. With help he escaped to the United States in 1941, one step ahead of the Nazis. The exile and the Holocaust deepened the sorrow under his bright colors.
He later returned to France and lived to a great age, honored across the world.
Painting with light
In his later decades Chagall became a master of stained glass. His windows glow in cathedrals, in a synagogue in Jerusalem, and at the United Nations, turning his floating figures into pure colored light.
He also painted the vast ceiling of the Paris Opera, filling it with scenes from the operas and ballets, a Russian Jewish outsider crowning one of France's grandest buildings.
Quick answers about Marc Chagall
What is Marc Chagall known for?
Dreamlike paintings of Jewish village life and floating lovers, and luminous stained glass. See what is surrealism.
Where was he from?
Vitebsk, then in the Russian Empire, now Belarus.
Did he escape the Nazis?
Yes. He fled occupied France for the United States in 1941.
Why he still matters
Chagall kept tenderness and folklore alive through a century of horror, and proved that joy and color could be serious art. His glowing windows still stop people in their tracks. See how layered color builds that glow in what is oil painting.
One last fact. He painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera for free, as a gift to France, the country that had given him refuge.