He painted Jesus as a Jew: who is Marc Chagall?

Russian-born French painter Marc Chagall, whose real name is Moishe Shagal, was born on July 7, 1887, in the town of Vitebsk, within the borders of Belarus, in a large Jewish family consisting of, as he put it, a laborer father, an authoritarian mother, several siblings, grandmothers, and grandfathers.

“But, first of all, I was stillborn,” explains Marc Chagall in his autobiography, My Life: Marc Chagall. Because the night he was born, a huge fire breaks out in the town, and they move the baby, whose condition is hopeless, to another safer place on the other side of the city. In his childhood, Chagall observed the social and cultural life of the Jews well, which would later find their way into his works.

Marc Chagall (born Moishe Shagal; 6 July 1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

Chagall's mother, to whom he once showed his painting, says: “Yes, son, I see; you have the ability. But baby listen to me. Maybe you'd better get an apprentice somewhere."

He began his art education with Yehuda Pen in Vitebsk in 1906 and between 1908-1910 went to Zvantseva, an avant-garde painting and drawing school in St Petersburg, run by the Royal Society for the Advancement of Fine Arts. Here, through his teacher Léon Bakst, he gets to know the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin. Although his life in the city was difficult due to the restrictions imposed on the Jews, he made his first paintings. His paintings such as Self Portrait With Brushes, Russian Wedding, Birth, and The Dead Man are examples from this period.

In his autobiography, he writes that he liked to sit on the roof of his grandfather's house and eat carrots. In Vitebsk, Chagall's town, at important moments of life (marriage, death, birth), violinists appear and make music. All this is revealed in the 1908 painting The Dying Man, depicting a woman sitting on the roof crying with the violinist, the dead body, his uncle's barbershop, and the grocery store in Vitebsk together.

The artist, who went to Paris with a scholarship he won in 1910, did not like the city very much at first, he got used to it over time and stayed for four years. The artist, who had the opportunity to meet the leading painters, writers, and poets of his time during his years in Paris, was influenced by famous poets such as Apollinaire, André Breton, Blaise Cendrars and painters such as Delaunay, Léger, and Modigliani, and started to search for new paintings.

In Chagall's work called Studio in Paris, Van Gogh's influences are seen in terms of color.

In Paris, he gains a strong color technique under the influence of the Fauvists. In 1911, he befriended painters such as Léger, Delaunay, Gleizes, and Modigliani and became interested in Cubism. Chagall shows a tendency towards cubism in his paintings, especially between 1911 and 1912, with the analytical thinking technique of Picasso and Braque. The spatial arrangements in the background of the paintings carry the effects of cubism analytically and synthetically. However, his cubism is different from Picasso and Braque.

It distorts the anatomical structure of the figures, breaks them apart, and deforms them to portray people in a different way. He interprets the Cubist movement with a slightly different understanding with his own unique essays. He thinks that there is a surrealist core at the origin of this movement. This personal thought of him also overlaps with mystical elements in the spiritual sense. He uses religious-themed symbols in some of his paintings.

Chagall's first solo exhibition in Berlin in March 1914, at the suggestion of Apollinaire, was in a way the beginning of German Expressionism. In 1914 he returns to Vitebsk via Berlin, but the outbreak of the First World War prevents him from returning to Paris. There he married Bella Rosenfeld, whom he first met in 1909, in 1915. A daughter named Ida comes to the world. In his paintings after this date, we often encounter happy lovers. During this period he works in a realistic style, but he does not stop dividing the painting surface with the Cubist style.

He did not adhere to any school or painting style. In his works, a unique style consisting of traces of all the painting movements of his period and the participation of lyricism is seen. His childlike style is the reflection of the subjective inner world, apart from the logical principles and cause-and-effect relationships we are accustomed to. Paintings appear outside the borders of the world we know, as a fairy-tale-like world that sometimes seems meaningless, in which the conformity of the object with its nature is not important.

Before the October Revolution of 1917, he was deeply affected by the restrictions imposed on the Jews in Russia and the atmosphere of turmoil. After the revolution, he was appointed as the art commissioner of the Vitebsk province and established an art gallery of which he was the director. However, Chagall disagreed with the painter Malevich, so he left Russia in 1920 and returned to Moscow and then Paris.

Chagall's 59 works, which were exhibited in Paris in 1924 and Basel in 1933, were shown under the name of Degenerate Art by the Nazis in order to defame them. This is something that happened to many artists in Germany of those years. Chagall, who became a French citizen in 1937, went to America like other painters who had a hard time in Europe during the Second World War. Lived in America from 1941-1948. In 1944, his life becomes difficult with the untimely death of his wife, Bella, whom he loves very much and lives a happy life. After a while, he returns to France and continues his studies. Eight years after Bella's death, he remarried to Virginia Haggard Vava and had a son.

One of his best-known paintings in the United States is The White Crucifixion. While the Nazis brutally murdered the Jews, the massacres that began on Crystal Night on November 9, 1938, lasted for days. At the end of the night of the Pogrom, known as it is known, about a hundred Jews are killed and many Synagogues are destroyed. Marc Chagall paints this painting as anti-war but uses Jewish symbols. The crucified Jesus has a Jewish turban on his head, and the Tallit, the prayer scarf of Judaism (used by men). Both symbols are important in the Jewish faith. The point that the artist wants to reach is clear: Jesus is a Jew.

Chagall has also done biblical illustrations. In the early 1930s, the artist depicted some subjects inspired by religious texts. The Bible illustrations were commissioned by Ambroise Vollard.

Marc Chagall died on March 28, 1985, at the age of 97, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. In 1973, the Chagall Museum opens in Nice, France. In 1997, in his hometown of Vitebsk, the house where he spent his childhood with his family was converted into a museum. This museum only exhibits copies of the painter's work.