Chagall kept flying over Vitebsk for ninety-seven years
Jewish boys were barred from the ordinary high school, so young Moishe Shagal's mother handed the headmaster 50 roubles to let him in. Renamed Marc Chagall, the boy from near Vitebsk lived until 1985, painted his childhood shtetl again and again, and with one glassmaker filled 86 windows across Europe, Israel and the United States.
Eldest of nine in a Pale of Settlement town Repin nicknamed a Russian Toledo, he watched his father haul herring barrels for twenty roubles a month, above the imperial average of thirteen, and felt his Jewishness at every step, once denying it to a gang of pogromniks to stay alive. A schoolmate's drawings, and the blunt advice to copy any picture from a library book, set him on his path; in 1906 Yehuda Pen taught him free of charge alongside Lissitzky and Zadkine, and he chose to put his Jewish roots on show in paint rather than hide them.
Pre-war circuits through Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin mixed Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism into dreamy Vitebsk streets and fiddlers. Wartime Vitebsk and Petrograd saw him found a museum and People's Art School; post-Revolution hardship drove a 1923 Paris return. Occupied France forced a seven-year New York exile before 1948 repatriation. Critic Robert Hughes called him the quintessential Jewish artist of the century; Michael J. Lewis, the last of modernism's first generation.
With the glassmaker Charles Marq he made windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, Zürich's Fraumünster, the United Nations and Jerusalem, and he painted part of the Paris Opéra ceiling. For the Art Institute of Chicago came the America Windows, a 1977 Bicentennial gift whose panels move, left to right, through music, painting, literature, architecture, theatre and dance. Picasso predicted in the 1950s that once Matisse was gone, Chagall would be the last painter who truly grasped colour.
In 1906 he reached Saint Petersburg on a friend's temporary passport, since Jews could not enter without papers, and from 1908 to 1910 studied under Léon Bakst, the Ballets Russes designer whose career showed a Jewish artist what was possible. Trips home brought him to Bella Rosenfeld, who later compared his almond-shaped blue eyes to little boats drifting on their own. In 1938 White Crucifixion became the first of his paintings to cast Jesus as a Jewish martyr in traditional dress, ringed by pogrom scenes aimed at Nazi Germany.
Source: Marc Chagall
