Product Description

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival.

Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.

His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists—the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.

Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.

Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #213065 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-21
• Released on: 2008-10-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

From Publishers Weekly
This thorough exploration of celebrated postmodernist painter Chagall begins with his 1887 birth in Vitebsk, a small Jewish town in Russia that he would repeatedly return to, both literally and artistically. He immigrated to Paris in 1911, where he soaked up Impressionism and identified immediately with Gauguin and Picasso's Cubism. Returning to Vitebsk in 1914, moments before the beginning of the Russian Revolution, Chagall was initially prized by the Bolsheviks, who wanted to put him in charge of the visual arts department in the Soviet education agency. Chagall declined, helping instead to establish the Vitebsk People's Art College, but the Bolshevik obsession with "peasant art" and the increasingly ominous political climate sent Chagall, along with his wife Thea and daughter Ida, back to Paris. Though the move proved to be Chagall's big break, the transformation of Vitebsk and general ruin of Russia weighed heavily on him. Chagall's life, talent and times are documented meticulously by biographer Wullschlager (author of 2001's Hans Christian Andersen), producing a complete portrait of an inspiring, complicated artist who merged French and Russian sensibilities, invoked "the concrete village disposition... of Vitebsk and the global cosmic one of Russian abstraction," and suffered as both victim and survivor of Fascism's first wave. 32 pages color illustrations, 155 b&w illustrations.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Meryle Secrest Of all the 20th-century artists whose work owes a debt to their childhoods, none presents a clearer example than Marc Chagall. The inspiration for his paintings, with their dancing fiddlers and flying peddlers, their smiling cows and donkeys, comes from one place and society: the Russian town of Vitebsk and the Jews who lived there. Many artists' themes owe something to their origins, but few painters have been more intent on reflecting a culture through the prism of their experiences. Looking back, Chagall wrote later of Vitebsk, "I didn't have one single picture that didn't breathe with your spirit and reflection." Chagall was born into a culture that, having existed for centuries, would be swept away in his lifetime. (Vitebsk itself is now part of Belarus.) His father was a laborer, condemned to a life of drudgery; his mother resourceful but uneducated. He was the first of her nine children, born in 1887, and her favorite. That outpouring of love gave him, as Jackie Wullschlager writes in her compelling biography, "a robustness and basic optimism and made him a survivor in life; it also lent him a vulnerability in his extreme dependence on women." This new biography is not the first but is certainly the most extensive book about Chagall, thanks to the author's access to a hitherto closed cache of the artist's letters and papers, made available by his granddaughter Meret Meyer Graber. Chagall's childhood in a poor suburb of Vitebsk, where pigs and cows wandered in and out of houses, ought to have condemned him to the same life as his father in that closed world of Hasidic Jewry. But his mother had other ideas. She fought to get him into a good high school, where he began drawing lessons and studied mathematics, music and poetry. Step by step he worked his way toward the heretical goal of becoming an artist by winning scholarships and studying with influential mentors in St. Petersburg. One of them was Ilya Ginzburg, a sculptor who knew Tolstoy, Repin and Gorky, and introduced Chagall to his first wealthy patron. His mature style dates from his 1908 painting of a murder that took place one dark morning outside his childhood home. He heard a woman's screams and later recalled seeing a coffin, a black horse and a dead man laid out on the floor, his face illumined by candles. The murder inspired the painting "The Dead Man," a tapestry of his emotional responses transformed like a stage set into a collage of dreamlike images. Chagall had learned to tap into a powerful "emotion recollected in tranquillity," a process that Wordsworth described as essential to the genesis of any creative work. Somehow Chagall "transformed the cramped, dull backstreets of his childhood to a vision of beauty and harmony on canvas," Wullschlager writes. Making art out of shtetl life was, to say the least, original. Moving to St. Petersburg gave him the perspective of distance to see Vitebsk's cultural obsolescence even as he was celebrating its past. That vision sustained him in the tumultuous years that followed. He moved to Paris, experimented with Cubism, fell in love with Bella Rosenfeld, a friend of his then girlfriend, and eventually married her. Bella was from a family of rich Vitebsk jewelers and working toward a career in the theater. She became the model for some of his most tender and moving works, among them "The Birthday," in which they float, kissing, above their everyday surroundings. This theme of levitation, a frequent motif in his paintings, suggests liberation, even intoxication with life. In another painting, "Double Portrait with Wineglass," he portrayed himself perched on Bella's shoulders. The wellsprings of his art were bound up with a lover's unquestioning, self-sacrificing love. Bella was his art's as well as his love's personification; when she died suddenly in 1944, Chagall took up with Virginia McNeil, an Englishwoman hired to be his housekeeper, before marrying the adoring, manipulative Valentina (Vava) Brodsky. Chagall's long odyssey from Paris back to Russia on the eve of the Revolution, his brief role as a Commissar of Art in Vitebsk, his escape in 1922 from Russia and its rising anti-Semitism to Berlin and then Paris once more, coincided with growing sales, popularity and a fame that has never left him. He lived to the great age of 97, spending his final years in New York. Yet as this sympathetic and perceptive biographer writes, a desire for financial security in old age led Chagall to "an over-production of less-than-top-quality works." What had once given his art its strength, "the overriding autobiographical imperative," now became stale, even trite, "because his personal story was exhausted, the reinvention of the exile played out." To have outlived one's inspiration is hardly rare in art. If this biography has a shortcoming, it is its unruly length of almost 600 pages in which Chagall himself sometimes gets lost behind too-detailed descriptions of the supporting players. Yet Wullschlager has a sensitive understanding of his contribution that makes the book especially valuable. This biography presents Chagall's moving portraits of a vanished age in colors as glowing and haunting as his own canvases.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Thanks in large part to her access to a formally closed cache of Chagall's letters and papers, now belonging to his granddaughter Meret Meyer Graber, Wullschlager offers a thorough, fair, and intriguing look at the life and work of an artist who never really left home, despite permanently leaving Russia in 1922. Wullschlager writes that he "transformed the cramped, dull backstreets of his childhood to a vision of beauty and harmony on canvas." Chagall, a paradoxical figure in modern art, never quite fit into a particular movement, as Wullschlager's detailed examination of his paintings shows. A few critics seemed to search hard for flaws, and what emerged was the book's length and, as the reviewer from the New York Times Book Review claimed, a rather too-complete exploration of Chagall's dreamlike works. This is an excellent biography.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

Customer Reviews

Fine biography
A fine biography, the best from the generation which did not know Chagall personally. To what extent the weakness of relying on the perceptions and judgments of others is offset by the objectivity of having had no contact positive or negative with the subject is a matter for experts on Chagall and historiographers, not the lay reader. Most should find this as detailed and objective-seeming as the lay reader needs. Her interweaving of social, psychological and aesthetic observations are quite satisfying.
To take up an issue raised by one of the previous reviewers, this is not meant to be a monograph with picture by picture analysis. One should look elsewhere for that. However, it may prove legitimately annoying, even to a reader with appropriate expectations, that so many pictures are discussed which either are omitted from the volume or appear distant from the text in which they are mentioned with no easy way to reference them while reading.
For me that was a minor annoyance since I do have volumes of his pictures; others may find it more frustrating. As I have said, I think the lay reader will easily take it in stride in view of the quality of the book.
I should add that some people may find disturbing even this discreet treatment of what life for an artist, actor, writer, in Russia and the later Soviet Union, could be like, for persons born of Jewish heritage, in the twentieth century, where discrimination, torture and murder were the order of the day, particularly in the era of the Russian Stalin and the German-Austrian Hitler. Yet without some such knowledge, the artistic responses of the survivors, like Chagall, can never be understood.

One of the best biographies you will find on Chagall
Wullschlager is the art critic for the Financial Times, and writer of a biography of Hans Christian Andersen. In this massive biography of Chagall, she provides an excellent detailed history of his life, times and those surrounding him. Born in Russia at the end of the Nineteenth Century, much of Chagall's paintings reflected the world he left, a Jewish village life he wished to recreate. Chagall returned to Russia several times, finally leaving for good in 1923 and becoming a French citizen in 1937. The German invasion of France had Chagall, along with his first wife and daughter, escaping to the United States, only to return to France after the war. Wullschlager draws on many previously unavailable sources, including many family letters, to bring the life of Chagall out, not just as a list of events, but also as an emotional evolution; as Russia changed from tsarist to communist, the rise of European anti-Semitism in his adopted France, the death of many contemporary artists under Stalin, and the death of his first wife. Throughout it all, Chagall continued to paint and draw, sometimes the pastoral village life, other times surreal portraits or landscapes. The one drawback to the volume is a lack of commentary on the paintings reproduced, and the events at the time Chagall created them. The many photographs of Chagall, his family and contemporaries help make up for that. This is one of the best biographies you will find on Chagall, and will likely be the standard by which the next several will be judged.

Out of Vitebsk
People who enjoy the art created by Marc Chagall certainly will appreciate this fine biography. (However, it is neither an in-depth review of all his individual works of art nor, indeed, of his lasting place in the greater world of art history.)

The informed author, Jackie Wullschlager, helps the reader to understand Chagall by explaining his trying start in the backwater Russian town of Vitebsk, his deep Jewish heritage, and his darting amongst and away from the horrific European upheavals of the first half of the last century.

Ms.Wullschlager is especially informative about the four women who are vital to an understanding of Chagall's adult life: Bella, Virginia, Vava, and his daughter Ida.

Like many great artists, Chagall's family life and politics were often a mess. He was a flawed person. But his early paintings and late stained-glass windows remain, and they continue to speak for themselves.