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Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985)


Russian-Jewish painter who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire.
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Marc Chagall
In our life there is a single color as on an artist palette, which provides the meaning of life and art... It is the color of love.
Chagall quotes
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 theatre it is at that)?.. ..I am convinced that, were I to stop shaving, you would see in me a deceptive likeness.
Chagall
After completing my work (painting murals for the Jewish Teatre, fh) I thought, as has been agreed, that ot 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 thinhs (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”.




Chagall Marc quotes
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.
Chagall Marc
I sometimes have the impression that I have been born, between heaven and earth..the more I work the more I tried to align these paintings with a distant dream.
Marc Chagall quotes
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.
Marc Chagall
Listen what happened to me when I was in the fifth form (around 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 al all up in my bedroom..
Chagall Marc quotes
..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.
Chagall
Back in the days (a later reflection on his early Parish years, fh) 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 windbacks can carry on – but I’ve got work to do.
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