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Marc Chagall's prolific use of color made him one of the most iconic laureate artists of the 20th Century. In the early 1950s, Picasso put it pretty well about Chagall’s strengths and weaknesses: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is."
Chagall used bold and stark colors even when painting somber and pious subjects. This technical skill and artistic preference enabled him to bring out an uplifting vigor from the subject matters he chose to portray. What would nonetheless be traditional Russian folk tales and religious stories of a bygone era, were instantly inhabited by a magical and upbeat spirit.
Born to an impoverished family of 9 children, Chagall's early life bears very little resemblance to the glory of his artworks. His father was employed by a herring merchant and his mother only sold groceries from their home. He was born and raise in a rural Belarusian shetl - a Russian colony at that time - where his life was nothing more than commonplace and seemingly devoid of any magical or fantastical realm that more or less were the core embodiment of his works. In his autobiography, Chagall even compared the colors of the town to those of "shoes and potatoes".
Many art historians and biographers found his untraceable source of inspiration befuddling. In her new biography of Chagall, Jackie Wullschalager said, “It was startlingly original for a modernist artist, aspiring to an international outlook, to make art out of the shtetl — an environment from which anyone with cultural ambition was trying to escape and that had no pictorial traditions at all. No one else thought such a world worth recording.”
More than anything that Chagall was known for (one of the pioneers of modernism & co-founder of art movements like Fauvism and Surrealism), he was heralded as a Jewish artist whose religious beliefs heavily influenced his art and his life. Though there is hardly any conclusive explanation as to how Chagall's brilliant and pronounced use of colors came to be given the harshness and solitude of his life, you can only assume that his palette mirrored the hopefulness and happiness of his soul.
As he himself remarked, "Art seems to me to be a state of soul more than anything else." His faith in his beliefs kept his outlook buoyant in a post-World War II period that could have easily suppressed anyone's hope. In many of his works, objects, animals and people are often suspended in the air, seeming like any kind of movement is imminent if not for the limits of space and reality.
If more people took their cue from Chagall, the world would surely be a more colorful place in spite of all the grayness - like "shoes and potatoes" - that surrounds us.
The Jewish Artists Exhibit Runs through May 31st |
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