He eventually
went to St. Petersburg to study with Leon Bakst, a brilliant designer
of theatrical sets and costumes. It was in St. Petersburg that Chagall
had his first contact with European and French contemporary art. This
encouraged him to go to Paris in 1910. He was soon a member of the
large group of foreign artists living in Montmartre and his circle
of friends included Modigliani, La Fresnaye, and Delaunay, among others.
Almost immediately Chagall began to paint in his own personal style,
using a bright palette and taking his subject matter from childhood
memories. These were at first presented in large Cubist
planes that soon vanished from his compositions. Chagall's first big
exhibition was held in Berlin in 1914 where his color and fantasy
influenced postwar German artists considerably.
Chagall himself spent the war years in Russia and was appointed Commissar
of Fine Arts for the Vitebsk area after the Russian Revolution of
1917. He left this post after a disagreement with the Suprematist
painter, Malewitsch, and went to Moscow to paint murals for the Jewish
Theatre, finally returning to France in 1922. His reputation was firmly
established by that time and he received commissions to illustrate
several books the most important being the Bible, for which he traveled
to the Holy Land.
Chagall spent the years of the Nazi occupation in
the United States and returned to France to settle in 1947. Later
in his life he divided his time between Venice and Paris, painting,
designing stained-glass windows, and giving away his great public
works, such as those for the United Nations, the Jerusalem Synagogue,
and the Paris and New York opera houses. Chagall's painting, with
its delicate, undulating line and its brilliant, varied palette, offers
a dream world in which anything delightful may happen as laws of gravity
are overturned, fairy tales come true, and gentle mystics come to
life. His world was a happy mixture of dream and reality, fantasy
and nostalgia, delight in nature and in music, and a genuine love
of humanity.
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