Marc Chagall



Marc Chagall (July 7 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-Jewish painter who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. He worked in Paris from 1910 till 1914, and after his Russian years (1914–1922) he returned to Paris. Among the celebrated painters of the 20th century, he is associated with the modern movements after Impressionism, but found the motifs of his painting in his religious Russian background.

1910s

 * I am working in Paris. I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.
 * Chagall's letter to A. N. Benois, 1911, as cited in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 146


 * For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time.. .It was under the influence of the pogroms. Then I painted and drew him in pictures about ghettos, surrounded by Jewish troubles, by Jewish mothers, running terrified with little children in their arms.
 * From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 218
 * Chagall started in 1912 (in Paris) to paint his 'Golgotha' and later more Crucifixions. In this (later! quote) Chagall looks back on this question.


 * If Russian painters were condemned to become the pupils of the West they were, I think, rather unfaithful ones by their very nature. The best Russian realist conflicts with the realism of Courbet. The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves on perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissaro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root. Why my language itself is foreign to them. Why people do not place confidence in me. Why the artistic circles fail to recognize me. Why in Russia I am entirely useless.. .In Paris, it seemed to me that I was discovering everything, above all a mastery of technique..  .It was not in technique alone that I sought the meaning of art then. It was as if the gods had stood before me..  .I had the impression that we are still only roaming on the surface of matter, that we are afraid to plunge into chaos, to shatter and overthrow beneath our feet the familiar surface. (reaction on his first arrival in Paris, 1910)
 * Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 262, (translation Daphne Woodward)


 * In response I am sending you some pictures which I painted in Paris out of homesickness for Russia. They are not very typical of me; I have selected the most modest ones for the Russian exhibition.
 * letter to Mstislav V. Dobushinsky, = A. N. Benois, 1912; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 147


 * My works are dear to me, each in its own way, I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgement. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there (exhibition in Gallery Der Sturm, Berlin June-July, 1914) and it is no small sum..
 * letter to A. N. Benois, 1914, on his return to Russia; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 147


 * The sun has only ever shone for me in France (it certainly did that!). I have got used to beating the streets of Paris, happy beyond words dreaming of a life 125 years long - with the Louvre radiant in the distance. (Chagall couldn't go back to Paris because of the outbreak of the first World War in 1914). Having ended up in the Russian provinces, << I have decided to die >>.
 * letter to Sergei K. Markovsky, 1915; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 149
 * ..But it doesn't frighten me, because I studied in France, thank God, and I know of no artist in history who was not 'literary' when it came down to it. Not a single one. And even if they don't appear to be, I know of none and you at least don't recall them, because there is nothing to recall.. .Sometime or other I'd like to see a < > artist, but I didn't even find one in France. Obviously the trouble is that one approaches painting from the other side, so that the word < > conceals the point of the thing. Yet even the most beautiful and < > sujet (an apple, a grape or any << non-figurative painting >>) doesn't help if there are no foundations, either innate or acquired through hard work..  .Why don't we say clearly: << That is freedom, and this is commitment to the subject >> and << to each tree its berries >>, but let it be a tree and not a donkey..
 * letter to A. N. Benois, 1918; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 150


 * Or is all this fuss actually important for < >? Oh, no, never. If things only ever originated as a result of such competition (between subject- and subjectless art), it wouldn't be worth living among them, like an accidental, capricious toy. Clearly there is a greater, a more serene and more modest power, but we are either too lazy to live by its laws, or we have no time, or it "hurts too much".
 * letter to A. N. Benois, 1918; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 150

1920s

 * At present there is an extremely exaggerated formation of groups (students on the School of Art in Vitebsk) around 'trend'; there are 1. young people following Malevich and 2. young people following me. We both belong to the left-wing artistic movement, although we have different ideas about ends and means. Obviously it would take too long to talk about this problem now.. .But there is one thing I will tell you: Although I was born in Russia - and what is more: in the "settlement territory"  – I was trained abroad and am all the more sensitive to everything that is taking place here in the field of art (the fine arts). The memory of the splendour of the original is much to painful for me..[to live – crossed out]
 * letter to Pavel Davidovitch Ettering, 2 April, 1920, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 73


 * Now at least 'artists have the upper hand' in the town (Vitebsk). They get totally engrossed in their disputes about art (between constructivists and suprematists), I am utterly exhausted and 'dream' of 'abroad'.. .After all, there is no more suitable place for artists to be (for me, at least) than at the easel, and I dream of being able to devote myself exclusively to my pictures. Of course, little by little one paints something, but it's not the real thing. (Chagall was director of the Art School of Vitebsk, including many conflicts)
 * letter to Pavel Davidovitch Ettering, 2 April, 1920, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 74


 * After completing my work [his murals for the Jewish Theater in Moscow) I thought, as has been agreed, that it would be shown in public as a series of my latest things. The management will agree with me that I can find no inner peace as a painter until the 'masses' see my work etc. It turned out that the things [the murals] had been put into a 'cage', as it were, where they can be seen at the very best by (if you will forgive me for saying so) Jews at close quarters. I like the Jews a lot (there's enough 'proof' of that) but I like the Russians as well and some other nationalities, and I am used to painting serious things for many 'nationalities'.
 * In a letter to the management of the State Jewish Kamerny Theater, 1921, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 89


 * I set to work. I pointed a mural for the main wall: Introduction to the New National Theatre. The other interior walls, the ceiling and the friezes depicted the forerunners of the contemporary actor – a popular musician, a wedding jester, a good woman dancing, a copyist of the Torah, the first poet dreamer, and finally a modern couple flying over the stage. The friezes were decorated with dishes and food, beigels and fruits spread out on well-laid tables. I looked forward to meeting the actors who passed me: 'Let us agree. Let's join forces and throw out all this old rubbish. Let's work a miracle!' (c. 1921)
 * 'Chagall in the Yiddish Theater', Avram Kampf, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 101


 * In exasperation, I furiously attacked the floors and walls of the Moscow Theater. My mural paintings sight there, in obscurity. Have you seen them? Rant and rave, my contemporaries! In one way or another, my first theatrical alphabet gave you a belly-ache. Not modest? I'll leave that to my grandmother: it bores me. Despise me, if you like. (ca. 1921)
 * 'Chagall in the Yiddish Theater', Avram Kampf, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 94


 * The stars were my best friends. The air was full of legends and phantoms, full of mythical and fair-tale creatures, which suddenly flew away over the roof, so that one was at one with the firmament.
 * Chagall's early work in the Soviet Union, Alexander Kamensky; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 41


 * If I weren't a Jew (in the sense in which I use the word) then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.
 * Bletlach (Leaflet - essay in Yiddish), Marc Chagall; published in 'Shtrom' No. 1, 1922


 * The Jews might well, were they of such a mind (as I am, lament the disappearance of all those who painted the wooden synagogues in the small towns and villages (oh why haven't I gone to my grave with them!), and the carvers of the wooden 'school mallets' – 'quiet boy!' (and if you should see them in Ansky's collection, you’ll get a shock!). But is there really any difference between my ancestor from Mohiliev, who painted the synagogue there, and myself, who painted the Jewish theater in Moscow (and a good theater it is at that)?.. .I am convinced that, were I to stop shaving, you would see in me a deceptive likeness.
 * Bletlach (Leaflet - essay in Yiddish), Marc Chagall; published in 'Shtrom' No. 1, 1922


 * Back in the days (a later reflection on his early Parish years) when I was in Paris in my studio in 'La Ruche', through the partition I heard two Jewish emigrants arguing: 'Well, what would you say? Wasn't Antokolsky a Jewish artist? And Israels? And what about Liebermann?' The dim light of the lamp lit up my picture, which was upside down (that's the way I work – so consider yourself yourselves lucky!). As morning came, and the Parisian sky started to brighten up, I had to laugh about the futile comments of my neighbours on the fate of Jewish art: 'You two wind-backs can carry on – but I've got work to do'.
 * Bletlach (Leaflet - essay in Yiddish), Marc Chagall; published in 'Shtrom' No. 1, 1922


 * If I weren't a Jew (in the sense in which I use the word) then I wouldn't be an artist, or at least not the one I am now.
 * Bletlach (Leaflet - essay in Yiddish), Marc Chagall; published in 'Shtrom' No. 1, 1922

My Life (1922)

 * My Life, Marc Chagall - written in Moscow in 1921–1922


 * 'There you are', said Efros [Granovsky, director of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, in 1920], leading me into a dark room, 'These walls are all yours, you can do what you like with them'. It was a completely demolished apartment that had been abandoned by bourgeois refugees. 'You see', he continued, 'the benches for the audience will be here; the stage there'. To tell the truth, all I could see there was the remains of a kitchen.. .And I flung myself at the walls. The canvases were stretched out on the floor. Workmen, actors walked over them. The rooms and corridors were in the process of being repaired; piles of shavings lay among my tubes of paint, my sketches. At every step one dislodged cigarette-ends, crusts of bread.
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 38


 * Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.. .It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia [where Chagall was born] took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort..  .It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West. (a later quote on his first arrival in Paris, 1910)
 * Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 261, (translation Daphne Woodward)


 * ..No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris. Beginning with the market – where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber – the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism, everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 29


 * My grandfather, a teacher of religion, could think of nothing better than to place my father – his eldest son, still a child – as a clerk with a firm of herring wholesalers, and his youngest son with a barber. No, my father was not a clerk, but, for thirty-two years, a plain workman [in the Jewish ghetto of Vitebsk ]. He lifted heavy barrels, and my heart used to twist like a Turkish pretzel as I watched him carrying those loads and stirring the little herrings with his frozen hands.. .Sometimes my father's clothes would glisten with herring brine. The light played above him, besides him. But his face, now yellow, now clear, would sometimes break into a wan smile.
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 23


 * Listen what happened to me when I was in the fifth form (ca. 1904), in the drawing lesson. An old-timer in the front row, the one who pinched me the most often, suddenly showed me a sketch on tissue paper, copied from the magazine "Niva": The Smoker. In this pandemonium! Leave me alone. I don't remember very well but this drawing, done not by me but by that fathead, immediately threw me into a rage. It roused a hyena in me. I ran to the library, grabbed that big volume of "Niva" and began to copy the portrait of the composer Rubinstein, fascinated by his crow's-feet and his wrinkles, or by a Greek woman and other illustrations; maybe I improvised some too, I hung them all up in my bedroom..
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 24-25


 * Two or three o'clock in the morning. The sky is blue. Dawn is breaking. Down there, a little way off, they slaughtered cattle, cows bellowed, and I painted them. I used to sit up like that all night long. It's already a week since the studio was cleaned out. Frames, eggshells, empty two-sou soup tins lie about higgledy-piggledy.. .On the shelves, reproductions of El Greco and Cézanne lay next tot the remains of a herring I had cut in two, the head for the first day, the tail for the next, and Thank God, a few crusts of bread.
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, pp. 29-30
 * Chagall describes a morning in his studio in Paris, c. 1911, in 'La Ruche' an old factory where many artists as Soutine, Archipenko, Léger and Modigliani had their studio


 * It's only my town (Chagall was born in Vitebsk), mine, which I have rediscovered. I come back to it with emotion. It was at that time that I painted my Vitebsk series of 1914. (Chagall couldn't go back to Paris because of the outbreak of the first World War in 1914) I painted everything that met my eyes. I painted at my window; I never walked down the street without my box of paint.
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 31
 * * But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky [the political communist commissar for Education, ca. 1918] 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases.
 * Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 34

after 1930

 * ..In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others.
 * In the last lines of his lecture at the Congress of the Jewish Scientific Institute Vilnius, in 1935, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 58


 * The Jews might well, were they of such a mind (as I am, lament the disappearance of all those who painted the wooden synagogues in the small towns and villages - oh why haven't I gone to my grave with them!), and the carvers of the wooden 'school mallets' – 'quiet boy!' (and if you should see them in Ansky’s collection, you’ll get a shock!). But is there really any difference between my ancestor from Mohiliev, who painted the synagogue there, and myself, who painted the Jewish theatre in Moscow (and a good theater it is at that)?.. .I am convinced that, were I to stop shaving, you would see in me a deceptive likeness.
 * In: 'Shtrom' No. 1, 1922, Marc Chagall; as quoted in 'Chagall and the Jewish art programme', by Grigory Kasovsky
 * Chagall's quote is explaining his relation to the Jewish society and Jewish art history 'Bletlach' (Leaflet - essay in Yiddish)


 * If a symbol should be discovered in a painting of mine, it was not my intention. It is a result I did not seek. It is something that may be found afterwards, and which can be interpreted according to taste.
 * In Marc Chagall 1887-1985: Painting As Poetry by Ingo F. Walther, Rainer Metzger, p. 78


 * I know I must live in France, but I don't want to cut myself off from America. France is a picture already painted. America still has to be painted. Maybe that's why I feel freer there. But when I work in America, it's like shouting in a forest. There's no echo.
 * as quoted by Joseph A. Harriss, in 'The Elusive Marc Chagall', - the 'Smithsonian Magazine', December 2003


 * Only a child had its place on the cross, and that was enough for me [to paint his Crucifixions, earlier].. ..in the exact sense there was no cross but a blue child in the air. The cross interested me less.
 * as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219
 * When I painted Christ's parents I was thinking of my own parents. The bearded man is the Child's father. He is my father. [Chagall stated this in 1950]
 * as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219

Quotes about Marc Chagall

 * When I write, I fly to another dimension. Like Eva Luna, I try to live life as I would like it to be, as in a novel. I am always half flying, like Marc Chagall's violinists.
 * Isabel Allende, Interviews with Latin American writers by Marie Lise Gazarian Gautier (1989)


 * Jacques Lipchitz and Marc Chagall were among the European artists who settled in New York City during the war...Chagall, after his arrival in 1941, also continued to explore imagery he had developed earlier, including that of the Wandering Jew and the crucified Jesus as well as the inhabitants of East European shtetls or villages.
 * Matthew Baigell Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust (1997)


 * Under his [Chagall's] sole impulse metaphor [comparison of images] made its triumphal entry into modern painting.
 * André Breton, as quoted in Chagall – a biography, Jackie Wullschlagger, Knopf, Publisher, New York 2008, text from inside-cover


 * When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes.. ..long, almond-shaped..  ..and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat.
 * Bella Chagall; her description of their first encounter in Vitebsk, c. 1908-9; as quoted in 'Head over heels in love: Marc and Bella Chagall's spectacular romance', by Daniel Jamieson, in The Guardian.com, Friday 27 May 2016


 * He prepared his charcoal pencils, holding them in his hand like a little bouquet. Then he would sit in a large straw chair and look at the blank canvas or cardboard or sheet of paper, waiting for the idea to come. Suddenly he would raise the charcoal with his thumb and, very fast, start tracing straight lines, ovals, lozenges, finding an aesthetic structure in the incoherence. A clown would appear, a juggler, a horse, a violinist, spectators, as if by magic. When the outline was in place, he would back off and sit down, exhausted like a boxer at the end of a round.
 * Quote of Chagall's son McNeil; as cited by Joseph A. Harriss, in 'The Elusive Marc Chagall', - the 'Smithsonian Magazine', December 2003
 * McNeil wrote of his father's working methods in a memoir that was published in France 2002


 * Some art historians have sought to decrypt his symbols, but there's no consensus on what they mean. We cannot interpret them because they are simply part of his world, like figures from a dream.
 * Jean-Michel Foray, director of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message Museum in Nice; as quoted in 'The Elusive Marc Chagall', Joseph A. Harriss, in 'Smithsonian Magazine', December 2003


 * When Henri Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. I'm not crazy about those cocks and asses and flying violinists and all the folklore, but his canvasses are really painted, not just thrown together. Some of the last thing's he's done in Venice [where Matisse painted his late frescoes in the chapel] convince me that there's never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has. [Picasso is reacting to Chagall's daughter Ida, 1952]
 * Pablo Picasso, 1952; in a writing of Francoise Gilot; as quoted in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 440


 * I don't know where he [Marc Chagall] gets those images; he must have an angel in his head.
 * Pablo Picasso; as cited in Marc Chagall, – a Biography, by Sidney Alexander, Cassell, London, 1978, p. 33