Marc Chagall—Lightness in dark times

Marc Chagall’s pictorial world defies the usual order of things. Nothing seems to be in its right place. There is only one constant in his life and work: the memory of his childhood and youth in Vitebsk.

In keeping with his roots in Orthodox Eastern Judaism, Chagall took a stance towards reality and its depiction different from that of his emancipated artist friends in the West. His doubts about visually verifiable reality led him to an original way to overcome the Jewish image ban. For the sake of the poetic representation of reality, he consciously accepts folkloristic simplifications and distortion of protagonists and houses. The people in Chagall’s pictures behave in outlandish ways: they walk through the air, play the violin on the roof. Chagall makes his figures larger or smaller according to their significance, not according to the optical laws of perspective. He piles spaces on top of each other and represents animals as equal to humans. In his late work, Chagall finally sacrificed form and construction altogether to the luster and transparent glow of sheer color.

100 works by the artist from all his creative years show the diversity of an oeuvre that never ceases to amaze. Chagall’s central themes are birth and motherhood, love, the circus, the Bible and death – with ever-recurring motifs: rooster and cow, goat or bull and fish, violinists, rabbis and clowns. Again and again, he reflects on his themes against the backdrop of personal experiences and world political events.

Chagall’s paintings give the impression of a human existence full of joie de vivre and happiness. In fact, it is the conflictful experience of joy and suffering that characterizes this work, cheerful and buoyant as it is, though without leaving out the dark and menacing: love, dance and play in times of persecution and displacement.