About the Artist—Marc Chagall

(See cover and the paintings by Marc Chagall throughout this issue)

Marc Chagall’s art is his diary; its vocabulary is dreams, memories and shimmering colors. The message is deeply personal, but the art carries a message for all mankind.

Chagall was born on July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia, a village in the Pale of Settlement, the region assigned the Jews by the czarist government. One of nine children born into a Hasidic Jewish family, Chagall’s artistic talent was recognized early. He first exhibited his paintings in Moscow in 1910 as a young man of 23; the same year he left Russia to live in Paris.

This move was the first of many for Chagall during a life in which he experienced the anguish and dislocation of two World Wars and the Russian Revolution. On a visit to Russia in 1914, Chagall was trapped by the onset of World War I, but during this enforced stay he met and married his beloved Bella Rosenfeld. Bella’s beautiful face and that of his second wife Valentina (Vava), whom he married eight years after Bella’s death in 1944, often appear in Chagall’s paintings.

Already famous in the West, Chagall returned in 1923 to France, where he resided for much of his long, creative life, adding the images of Paris to his repertoire. Defying popular artistic conventions, Chagall created a unique, imaginative world in what he called “an art of pure color.”