Marc Chagall, the painter who answered catastrophe with color

Marc Chagall

Photo: Hugo Erfurth / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 7, 1887 Lyozna, near Vitebsk, Russian Empire (now Belarus)
Died	March 28, 1985 (97)
Occupation	Painter
Awards	Wolf Prize in Arts · Erasmus Prize · Grand Cross, Légion d’Honneur · Venice Biennale Prize for Engraving · Carnegie Prize

Nobody in modern art floated quite like Chagall. Not in ambition — but literally: his painted figures rise off the ground and hover, embrace mid-air, drift above burning villages and quiet provincial streets, indifferent to gravity. That suspension was not fantasy and not Surrealism. It was, for Chagall, the most accurate description of what love felt like, what memory felt like, what it meant to carry a world inside you that the world outside had already decided to destroy.

Moishe Shagal was born in Lyozna, a village near Vitebsk in what is now Belarus, to a large Jewish family in the Pale of Settlement — his father an employee of a herring merchant, his mother running a grocery from their home. Vitebsk itself, where the family settled, was a mid-sized provincial city animated by Jewish community life that would shape Chagall’s visual vocabulary permanently: the shtetl market, the wedding ceremony, the green-faced fiddler on a rooftop who plays because music is all that remains when everything else is taken. He trained under local painter Yehuda Pen, then moved to Saint Petersburg to study under Léon Bakst — who recognized, without quite knowing what to do with it, a student who had no interest in painting anything that corresponded to external reality as others agreed to see it.

He arrived in Paris in May 1911 on a scholarship from his patron Max Vinaver, settled at La Ruche — the “beehive,” a cheap artists’ residence in Montparnasse that also housed Fernand Léger and Amedeo Modigliani — and began producing work that Guillaume Apollinaire would call “surnaturel!” (supernatural), a coinage that preceded Surrealism by a decade. He was neither Cubist nor Fauvist, though he studied both with the attention of a craftsman who understood that the point was not to join a school but to use what the schools had figured out and then go somewhere else. In I and the Village (1911) — a painting so structurally audacious it looks assembled from dream debris — a green-faced peasant faces a green-eyed cow across a divided circle, a woman walks upside-down in the distance, and the whole thing coheres into something that feels, impossibly, like a memory of a place. Not a record. A feeling.

Marc Chagall, 1912, Calvary (Golgotha), oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art — Marc Chagall, 1912, Calvary (Golgotha), oil on canvas, 174.6 × 192.4 cm, Museum of Modern Art, New York. By Peter Lucas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

He was supposed to be in Russia briefly. He went to Vitebsk in summer 1914 to see Bella Rosenfeld, the woman he would marry — and WWI sealed the border. He was stuck for eight years. They married in July 1915; their daughter Ida was born the following year. After the Revolution, he was appointed Commissar of Arts for Vitebsk and founded the Vitebsk People’s Art School — a utopian gesture that lasted until he invited Kazimir Malevich to teach there. Malevich arrived with Suprematism, the doctrine of pure geometric abstraction, and began converting the faculty. By May 1920 the school Chagall had built was being run by the people who believed the human figure had no future in art. He resigned and left for Moscow, then Berlin, then Paris. This defeat mattered: the argument between Chagall’s figurative, emotionally rooted painting and Malevich’s abstract program was not merely an art-school dispute. It was a dispute about whether art could be human and still be modern.

Back in Paris by 1923, a French citizen by 1937, Chagall entered a period of major institutional work — the Bible etchings commissioned by dealer Ambroise Vollard, illustrations for La Fontaine’s Fables, a growing reputation that should have secured everything. Instead Europe was approaching its catastrophe. In 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, he painted White Crucifixion: Christ on the cross dressed in a Jewish prayer shawl, the shroud a tallith, surrounded by burning synagogues, fleeing refugees, Torah scrolls consumed by fire. It is the most explicitly political painting he ever made, and it argues something that most of his other work argues more quietly: that Jewish suffering is not a specialized problem but a universal one, and that every great religious image carries the memory of its own persecution. Pope Francis later named it one of his favorite paintings.

Marc Chagall, 1911–12, The Drunkard (Le saoul), oil on canvas. 85 × 115 cm. Private collection. PD-US

He fled occupied France in 1941 through the Emergency Rescue Committee. His wife Bella died of a streptococcal infection in New York on September 2, 1944. Chagall stopped painting for nine months — the longest silence of his adult life. When he returned to work, he turned increasingly to stained glass: light that passes through rather than reflects, color as something you live inside rather than stand in front of. The stained glass commissions that dominated his final decades were not a decline into decorative work. They were the logical extension of what he had always been doing — making the viewer inhabit a world rather than observe it from a safe distance.

Back in France from 1948, settled eventually in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, he accumulated public commissions at a scale few painters in history have matched: twelve windows at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1962), the ceiling of the Paris Opéra (1964), the Peace Window at the United Nations (1964, in memoriam Dag Hammarskjöld), two murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York (1966), the America Windows at the Art Institute of Chicago (1977). Picasso, not given to conceding much, said: “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.”

The critical problem with Chagall’s legacy is precisely the thing that made him famous: the label “Jewish artist.” For some institutions and critics, it has been an honorific — recognition that his work preserved a cultural world obliterated in the Shoah, that his paintings of Vitebsk’s shtetl life constitute an irreplaceable document of something that no longer exists. For others, the label has been a reduction: a major modernist painter flattened into an ethnic category. Chagall himself never accepted the simplification. His imagery drew on Jewish folklore and the Old Testament, but also on Russian folk art, Catholicism (White Crucifixion is a Christian image at least as much as a Jewish one), and on a purely personal mythology that preceded any religious or ethnic category. He was not the Jewish Picasso any more than Picasso was the Spanish Chagall. The most honest position is that his origins are real and his work escapes them — which is the only interesting thing that origins ever do.

Marc Chagall died on March 28, 1985, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, at 97. The Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice — inaugurated in 1973, built to house his Biblical Message cycle, which he donated to the French state — remains active. In 2026, an exhibition at the Musée Chagall titled “Chagall at Work” documents his process across media. His stained glass in Jerusalem still catches light in the Hadassah synagogue morning by morning. His painted world — the green fiddler, the floating lovers, the luminous impossible blue of the Vitebsk night — continues to make the argument it always made: that the century which tried to eliminate that world did not succeed.

Tags: art, artists, painters, Marc Chagall, modern art, Ambroise Vollard