Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985)
Russian-Jewish painter who was born in Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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..
..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.
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.