Marc Chagall Jewish Encounters, Jonathan Wilson

Review by Fusinha

His style is not so simple and sentimental like it might look at the first sight. Reading “Marc Chagall Biography”, Jonathan Willson lets us notice that his painting is something more than just characteristic creatures, dreamy, soaring hills under the Jewish Witebsk sky – it’s the vast history of 20^th Century.

Being merely 13, with self-confidence he announced:”Mum, I’d like to become the greatest painter.” And so he became the greatest Jewish painter of 20^th Century, who captured the colorful world of the small towns buried by Nazis for good. But except houses` roofs, domed synagogues and the streets of native Witebsk, appears Jesus. Thanks to the painting “Dedicated to Christ”, exposed and making a huge impression during the Saloon of Independent in Berlin in 1913, Marc Chagall had started his international carrier.

Chagall knew form the very beginning how he wants to paint. Subsequent Petersburg schools, in which he was learning could not change or effect his visions or style. Copying classic masterpieces Chagall had found them tiring, full of boring decorativeness. That is why in 1910, thanks to Maxim Winawer`s scholarship, he turned up in the international capital of arts – Paris. France had became the artist’s motherland; here he had spent the most fruitful years of his lifetime.

There came out the paintings recognized by the critics as the most excellent works: “Self-portrait with seven fingers”, “Rain”, “Woman and donkey” or “Me and village” from 1911, where melancholic features mix with the spirit of surrealism. The creatures from his paintings do not respect and agree with gravity and their world is filled up with intensive, bright colors.

Not only as an artist but also as a man, Chagall wasn’t easily influenced by environment. He wasn’t part of the Parisian bohemia, hasn’t been drinking and sitting in coffee shops on Montparnasse, even though very often friends were trying to take him out of the studio. Most of the time he has been spending with poets or being on his own.

Showing suffering Jews by using Jesus as a simple Jewish boy (“Golgota” 1912) and Christian motives, rose controverersy in the Jewish community. Like decorating Christian churches, what often Chagall was doing in his late years.

It is out of discussion that he had been seduced by France. There he had been treated and respected as a great painter. It doesn’t surprise anybody that in 1948, after almost 10 years, he had left New York and settled down in Orgeval near Paris. He visited after 50 years his motherland, resurrected so many times in his paintings. After coming back he said that “Life goes on in France.” In the distance between the remembered world of province and the cultural center of the world lies the power of his paintings.