The first official website dedicated to Marc Chagall has gone live in a key year for the man hailed as the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century.
It is a massive labour of love initiated by Meret Meyer, granddaughter of the prolific Russian painter, sculptor and set designer, born Moishe Shagal near Vitebsk in 1887. Indeed, he was so productive that website director Ambre Gauthier says it will take years to complete the detailed list of the estimated 10,000 works the site ultimately aims to host.
“Chagall worked in stained glass and mosaic as well as paint, pen and ink, clay, stone and textiles. We don’t even know yet for sure the total number of pieces,” says art historian Gauthier, who is also director of the Chagall archives and catalogues.
Years of work have already gone into compiling a catalogue raisonné for every medium Chagall worked in but it will take several more years to complete. “We have started with the sculptures, ceramics will be next and everything will be listed from theatre sets and costumes to windows and tapestries as well as the thousands of paintings and drawings,” says Gauthier.
The website, in French and English, is being launched now because this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Chagall Museum in Nice and the opening of a year-long immersive event at the Atelier des Lumières in Paris, as well as exhibitions in Oslo, Madrid and Vilnius.
The Poet Reclining
The poet reclining (Marc Chagall)
Around 100 of the artist’s most beloved paintings, including scenes of shtetl life with an inevitable fiddler on the roof and self-portraits showing him in surreal, ecstatic flight over the world with his adored first wife Bella, are already uploaded to the Discovery section of the site as well as lesser-known gems like Solitude, Chagall’s 1933 commentary on the rise of antisemitism.
Held by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, its despairing subject sits prayer-shawled head in hands, clutching a Torah scroll, while a white cow has replaced the fiddler beside the instrument, predicting that even musicians would soon be banned from their profession.
By then Chagall, whose picture The Praying Jew was one of the first to be declared an example of degenerate art by the Nazis, was a star living in Paris, but he would be forced to flee France during the Occupation.
He found a temporary new home in the US, where he rose to even greater fame but was never happy, hanging out with poor Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side.
His life is engagingly detailed in the Biography section of the site, which tells how Chagall and his daughter Ida translated Bella’s memoir, written in Yiddish, after her death, and how creating sets for Stravinsky’s Firebird helped the artist survive his grief after she succumbed to a viral infection during wartime for lack of treatment.
Rare photographs from the archives include one of Virginia McNeil, the lover of seven years who bore him a son before they moved back to France in 1948.
But within four years she would leave him and he would marry Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, also Russian and Jewish and, like Virginia, a housekeeper found for him by Ida.
Chagall visited Israel for the unveiling of his stained-glassed windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Medical Centre and later the inauguration of the Knesset in Jerusalem, whose design incorporated his Wailing Wall mosaic and three giant tapestries.
Partners in the website project, led by the Association des Amis de Marc Chagall, include the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Institut National de l’audiovisual and the Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice.
“Everyone thinks they knows Marc Chagall’s work. But beyond the obvious and romantic image that has lasted for a long time, it is time to look the work in the face,” says Gauthier of the artist who worked until the day he died in 1985 at the age of 97.
marcchagall.com
