Everything can change in our demoralized world, except the heart, the love of man and his efforts to know the "divine" - Chagall.
This is Chagall's story, of how the artist used paint to tell about himself and where the images built in his paintings are devoid of illusion: everything lives in memories and in the reality that surrounds him. A story that should make everyone think a bit today, in a social moment where the image of us appears increasingly flaunted and rarefied. His smile is as bright as the sunlight that illuminates the orange trees of his house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, on the French Riviera, where shrubs, trees and flowerbeds look like fireworks of colour. This is where Marc Chagall lives and works, the painter who in his paintings has never given space to the gray of reality. He loved the music that always accompanied him in his artistic creations, but he was also a man of great culture, he knew how to talk about politics and society as befits a visionary man, naive ante litteram and above all a poet of the irrational. He dedicated his day to painting and in the evening he returned to dialogue with his palette to find a new idea and set his imagination back in motion. Chagall will forever remain one of the greats of modern art, endowed with a cultured sense of humour, he was an authentic "visionary".
In his paintings the cows fly and the embraced lovers float above the roofs intent on playing the violin. Irrationality for Chagall was the way to escape the reality of logic, a way to escape from the world in a conscious way. His ability to blend the sublime with irony, his inner vision with artistic expression: nothing fake to go overboard or to show he's different, but only himself. An artist and above all a man with a truly generous heart. To Israel he gave, among many treasures, the triptych of the Old Testament, an enormous tapestry that adorns the Knesset, the Palace of Parliament; to America the mosaic of the First National Plaza in Chicago, as well as two murals for the Metropolitan Museum; to Russia instead dozens of lithographs and two tapestries and gouaches; in France, stained glass windows and mosaics by Chagall adorn churches and cathedrals and even universities. Even the frescoed ceiling of the Paris Opera, which looks like a swirling circle of dancers, musicians, heroes and heroines (article L'Opéra de Paris: its history and France since Chagall) of melodrama, is a gift from the maestro to his adopted country. Chagall still gave France many paintings, etchings and lithographs, and this is how the Government of Paris, in 1973 to recognize his generosity, decided to house all the works in a specially built museum above Nice.
Born on July 7, 1887, in the Belarusian town of Vitesbk 300 kilometers from Moscow, he was the first of nine children of a humble Jewish worker who worked in a herring warehouse and a simple local woman. Vitesbk, was an agricultural and commercial center where a large Jewish community lived at the time, about twenty thousand people, and all in wooden houses along the Dvina river. The native place has always inspired Chagall who one day said "There is not an inch of paintings that I have painted that does not evoke my city". He began to draw when a school friend showed him a picture he had copied in a magazine and later went with him to St. Petersburg with 27 rubles stolen from his father in his pocket. Here he got used to doing all the odd jobs, as an apprentice sign painter, but he also managed to occasionally go to art school. In his youthful paintings, everything traces his childhood, uncle Neuč - who plays the violin – or the grandfather who eats carrots on the roof of the house; what was still missing at that time were the vivid colors of his artistic maturity.
The turning point came thanks to the help of a lawyer, Max Vinaver, who urged the young man to study abroad and to get him to leave he gave him a check so that he could support himself in Paris, where he arrived in 1910. He was lucky enough to end up in a studio called La Ruche, or "The Beehive", where Modigliani, Léger, Soutine, Lipchitz and Zadkine also stayed, but also the writer Blaise Cendrars and the poet Guilame Apollinaire. Thus it was the paintings of the impressionists, post-pressionists and fauves that made Chagall discover the secrets of light and colour.
Chagall's subjects were mostly Paris with the Seine and drunks, or the Eiffel Tower, then the memories of home, like his uncle and grandfather. In 1913 his first personal exhibition was organized in Berlin, it was a great success of fame and money for the sale of numerous paintings. The following year he returned to Vitesbk, where he married that great love that he had guarded in silence for many years, Bella Rosenfeld. The couple wanted to leave Russia but were blocked by the war and then by the October Revolution. Only later did he learn the technique of etching and from there the consecration with a major exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Basel. In 1941, while German troops devastated Europe, he fled to New York with his family, but a few years later his wife Bella left him and Chagall found himself alone with that silence of deep love that had united them. Back in France, in 1948, he married Valentine, an admirer, whose name everyone had shortened to "Vava", and it was with admiration that she filled his heart.
