It’s only my town (Chagall was born in Vitebsk, fh), 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, fh) I painted everything that met my eyes. I painted at my window; I never walked down the street without my box of paint.
--
My life, Marc Chagall, 1922; as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 31Marc Chagall
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, fh). Having ended up in the Russian provinces, << I have decided to die >>.
Marc Chagall
Now at least "artists have the upper hand" in the town (Vitebsk). They get totally engrossed in their disputes about art (constructivists and suprematists, fh), 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 paintws something, but it’s not the real thing. (Chagall was director of the Art School of Vitebsk, with many internally conflicts, fh)
Marc Chagall
I sat in my studio and painted, and did not need Nature as a prompter (after 1921, when he painted the series ‘Abstrakter Kopf’ –abstract Head, fh). I only had to immerse myself in myself, pray, and prepare my soul to a state of religious awareness. I painted many, many ‘Faces’.
Alexej von Jawlensky
She painted what she painted because she had to, because she was passionate about it. She didn't care at all if people bought her paintings. As she said, she painted her reality.
I find that I make as an artist the kind of choices that I have to be impassioned about. I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself. That's a difference.
Frida painted her own reality, her life. I'm a director and I paint many other people... Other people's realities. But I do have to invest in it.Julie Taymor
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, fh) 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. (on his arrival in Paris in 1910, fh)
Marc Chagall
Chagall, Marc
Chain, Ernst
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