Chagall: A Biography

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Chagall: A Biography

â€œWhen Matisse dies,â€ Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, â€œChagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.â€ 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, exileâ€”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 â€œpotato-coloredâ€ tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and LÃ©ger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where â€œone either died or came out famous.â€ But turmoil lay aheadâ€”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 violinistsâ€”the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagallâ€™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 Chagallâ€™s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as AndrÃ© Breton put it, â€œunder his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,â€ and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagallâ€™s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to lifeâ€”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 Spurlingâ€™s Matisse and John Richardsonâ€™s Picasso.
Country USA
Brand Knopf
Manufacturer Knopf
Binding Hardcover
ItemPartNumber 9780375414558
Color Multicolor
ReleaseDate 2008-10-21
UnitCount 1
Format Illustrated
EANs 9780375414558

Country	USA
Brand	Knopf
Manufacturer	Knopf
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	9780375414558
Color	Multicolor
ReleaseDate	2008-10-21
UnitCount	1
Format	Illustrated
EANs	9780375414558

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