Marc Chagall Research Paper

Marc Chagall was born in the Belo-Russian city of Vitebsk in 1887. Growing up in a small community, he developed a style with his painting of folk art and dream-like scenes. His Hassidic childhood is revealed in his paintings about his hometown with bleak houses and dark colors. Although he was raised Jewish he was never very religious, “just part of a world of human spirit.” Yet during WWII he painted with religious images and symbols. Chagall’s early training was with Yehuda Pen, a realist who painted en plein-air scenes of Jewish life and ran a drawing school in Vitebsk. Chagall didn’t care for Pen’s realism and moved to St. Petersburg in 1907, secretively, because Jews were not permitted into the city without a permit. He enrolled in

Petersburg and his first year in Paris in 1907. His art in Paris became sharp and piercing (I and the Village, 1911) compared to his gloomy earth tones he favored in Russia (Old Woman with a Ball of Yarn, 1906). He began with Russian expressionism and in Paris, the French Cubists Robert Delaunay and Fernand Leger influenced Chagall. His paintings Golgotha, 1912, and Homage to Apollinaire, 1911-1912, demonstrate his cubist foundation. He lived in Montparnasse, a village within Paris, and worked with the Paris School and later lived in La Ruche, “The Beehive,” an artist colony on the outskirts of Paris. While there, he concentrated on his supernatural subject matter that included fiddlers playing on rooftops, pastoral village scenes, cows, goats, chickens and weddings of his hometown of Vitebsk. His compositions played with the conventions of Cubism but his subjects were infused by passionate Russian emotions. He was attempting “to reconcile old Jewish traditions with styles of the modernist art. However, he also occasionally drew on Christian themes, which appealed to his taste for narrative and allegory.” During this early period Fauvism and Impressionism influenced him to use bright, clear colors. During his stay in Paris he was considered a part of the Avant Guarde and he was the most influential of the Surrealist