Chagall’s Life and Art

Marc Chagall: Introduction to the Jewish Theater, 1920 (State Tretyakov Gallery,
Moscow)

Richard Dorment reviews Jackie Wullschlager’s “Chagall:  A Biography” in a fascinating essay entitled “From Shtetl to Chateau” in the new issue of the New York Review of Books:

The painter known to the world as Marc Chagall was born Movsha (Moses) Shagal on July 7, 1887, into a poor family living on the fringes of the Russian Empire. When he died ninety-eight years later, he was the last surviving member of the
School of
Paris and a multimillionaire with a flat on the Quai d’Anjou in
Paris and a villa in the South of
France.

Swept up in the most momentous events of the twentieth century, including two world wars and the Russian Revolution, his long life was punctuated by dislocation, flight, immigration, and exile. . . . 

He was the eldest of nine children born to Yiddish-speaking followers of the Hasidic sect; his parents were poor but not impoverished. Khatskel, his father, hauled crates in a herring warehouse on the banks of the Dvina River; his illiterate mother, Feiga-Ita, ran a successful business selling provisions from home.

Vitebsk (today in
Belarus) was a town of rickety wooden dwellings, public bathhouses, unpaved streets, onion-domed churches, and more than sixty synagogues. On the poor side of town every householder kept goats, chickens, and a cow in the yard. Rabbis, Talmudic scholars, matchmakers, musicians, and elderly Jewish peddlers who could be seen wandering from town to town with sacks on their backs: the sights and sounds of Chagall’s childhood would become the subject of his art.

Chagall’s theater murals for the Yiddish Chamber Theater in Moscow, which Dorment writes are “are now universally regarded as his greatest artistic achievement,” are currently on view in an exhibition devoted to the Russian Jewish theater at the Jewish Museum in New York City until March 22, and will be at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco from April 25 through September 7, 2009.