Marc Chagall Research Paper

Calvin Suster
Art 1: Drawing
November 30, 2015
Marc Chagall Marc Zakharovich Chagall, who was a painter an illustrator, was born July 7th, 1887 in present day Belarus. At the time of his birth Belarus had not existed and it was part of the Russian Empire. Marc was born into a Lithuanian Jewish family in Lioza near the city of Vitebsk and Lioza was a small town with around 66,000 people living in it. Half the population of this city was Jewish so Marc grew up around people who were also Jewish. It was a picturesque city comprised of churches and synagogues. Marc was the eldest of nine children and the family name Shagal is a variant of the name Segal and this is a Jewish community usually born into the Levitic family. His father was a herring
The movement of Jews within the city were also restricted, so Chagall attended primary school at his local synagogue. His mother later bribed the principle with 50 robles for his high school to accept him even though he was a Jew. A major turning point in his artistic career happened when he noticed a fellow student drawing. He asked the student what he was doing and the student said "Go and find a book in the library, idiot, choose any picture you like, and just copy it". He went to the library and began copying pictures out of all the books he could find, he found this so rewarding that he soon decided that he would like to become an artist. Chagall told his mother of his aspirations and he attended the studio of Yehuda Pen who was a realist artist and he soon realized that this style of academic portrait painting did not suit him. Chagall later delved into the styles of Cubism and Expressionism. Cubism is the style in art in which perspective with a single viewpoint was abandoned and use was made of simple geometric shapes, interlocking planes, and later a collage. Another style he helped to create is Expressionism and Expressionism is the style of painting in which the artist seeks to express emotional experience rather than impressions of the external world. Stained glass windows, murals, tapestries, and Ceramics and Sculpture were all other forms of artwork in which
It’s not that he added many different colors its how he blended and distinguished the colors from one another that caught the viewer’s attention. Through his colors schemes he was able to create a “vibrant atmosphere” that was based on “his own personal vision.” Many of Chagall’s inspirations and subject matter stems from his experiences he had as a child growing up in a small town living in a wooden house with animals surrounding him. When he lived in France he was finally able to express this in the atmosphere of artistic freedom. Some things always remained constant in his work such as musicians and acrobats, Wullschlager explained the source of these images:
For him, clowns and acrobats always resembled figures in religious paintings... The evolution of the circus works... reflects a gradual clouding of his worldview, and the circus performers now gave way to the prophet or sage in his work—a figure into whom Chagall poured his anxiety as Europe darkened, and he could no longer rely on the lumiére-liberté of France for inspiration.
Chagall also described his love for circus