Marc Chagall (1889–1985) was a Russian-born French painter and graphic artist who worked using ceramics, mosaics and tapestry, and in theater design. He was one of the great masters of the School of Paris and was acclaimed as a forerunner of surrealism.
Born of Jewish parents in Vitebsk, Russia, now in Belarus, Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin in 1914, and, for a short time, was commissar of fine arts at Vitebsk, but in 1922, he left Russia and settled near Paris. He spent the years 1941–47 in the USA.
Chagall illustrated such books as Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables. He is most famous for whimsical pictures, in which a visual potpourri of animals, objects, and people from his past life and dreams, and Belarusian folklore and Jewish and biblical themes, is presented in an arbitrary color scheme of blues, greens, yellows, and pinks, as in Bouquet with Flying Lovers (1947.)
The word ‘Surrealist’ is said to have been coined by Guillaume Apollinaire to describe Chagall’s work. In 1945, Chagall designed decors and costumes for Igor Stravinsky’s Firebird.
Chagall also designed stained-glass windows for Jerusalem’s Hadassah-Hebrew Medical Centre (1962,) murals for the Paris Opéra and the New York Metropolitan Opera House (1966,) and mosaics and tapestries for the Knesset in Jerusalem (1969.)
Chagall’s autobiography is Ma Vie (1931; My Life.) Sidney Alexander wrote a biography Marc Chagall (1978.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Marc Chagall
Great art picks up where nature ends.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Art
In my youth, poverty enriched me, but now I can afford wealth.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Difficulties, Adversity
Time is a river without banks.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Time Management
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Theater
Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeeding.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Gardening
When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand—as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Art
In our lives there is a simple colour, as on an artists palatte, which provides the meaning of life and art. it is the colour of love.
—Marc Chagall
Topics: Romance
The fingers must be educated, the thumb is born knowing.
—Marc Chagall
All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.
—Marc Chagall
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