(Marc Chagall The Yellow Room, 1911 | Oil on canvas)
This show distils the elements that gave birth to Marc Chagall’s unique style of painting – his dreamlike images of snowy streets, wooden houses, fiddlers and his flying bride, Bella.
Primary among the influences was his Hasidic Jewish background growing up in the picturesque city of Vitebsk, known as Russia’s Toledo for its onion-topped churches.
Marc Chagall Birthday, 1915 | Oil on canvas
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
The son of a poor herring worker (hence the fish which appear in many works) Chagall fought through persecution and exclusion from mainstream Russian society to become one of the country’s most celebrated artists. Though influenced by his time in St Petersburg, Russian folk art, and avant-garde movements when he moved to Paris, his storehouse of visual imagery never expanded beyond his childhood landscape and in later years Chagall spoke of himself as a ‘boy still flying with wind in his head’. The show helps explain why Chagall is an artist whose work is recognisable even to those innocent of a formal ‘art education’.
Until September 2nd at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain
