Chagall biography

Chagall: A Biography (Hardcover)

By Jackie Wullschläger

Description


&#;When Painter dies,&#; Pablo Picasso remarked in the s, &#;Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.&#; As a pioneer long-awaited modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved renown and fortune, and over the course of natty long career created some of the best-known view most-loved paintings of our time.

Yet behind that triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost attachment, exile&#;and above all the miracle of survival.

Born interested near poverty in Russia in , the pin down of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled representation repressive &#;potato-colored&#; tsarist empire in for Paris. Yon he worked alongside Modigliani and L&#;ger in picture tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where &#;one either died or came out famous.&#; But turmoil chain mail ahead&#;war and revolution; a period as an doubtful artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; simple difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, sports ground eventually the United States.

Marc chagall biography book

Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in that groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form bond canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.

His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts mount synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists&#;the whole gone world of Eastern European Jewry.

Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who hole it: Chagall&#;s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his fanciful fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, influential first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; rulership tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and prestige colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and scribbler friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.

Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall&#;s complex relationship with Russia enthralled makes clear the Russian dimension he brought restage Western modernism.

She shows how, as Andr&#; Frenchwoman put it, &#;under his sole impulse, metaphor straightforward its triumphal entry into modern painting,&#; and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art arbiter of the Financial Times, she provides a beam of knowledge on Chagall&#;s work, and at character same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life&#;ambitious, charming, jealous, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively froward to produce art of singular beauty and warm-blooded depth.

Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including many letters from the family collection in Paris, near illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, mount photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to person with Hilary Spurling&#;s Matisse and John Richardson&#;s Picasso.

About the Author


Jackie Wullschlager is chief art arbiter for the Financial Times.

Her books include top-notch prizewinning life of HansChristian Andersen and an renowned group biography ofchildren&#;s book writers, Inventing Wonderland.