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Marc Chagall
Part of the Jewish Encounter series
Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall’s work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to “narrate” the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice.
Wilson brilliantly demonstrates how Marc Chagall’s life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in New York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present.
Wilson’s portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe–showing us how Chagall is the emblematic Jewish artist of the twentieth century.
Visit nextbook.org/chagall for a virtual museum of Chagall images.
Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall’s work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to “narrate” the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice.
Wilson brilliantly demonstrates how Marc Chagall’s life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in New York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present.
Wilson’s portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe–showing us how Chagall is the emblematic Jewish artist of the twentieth century.
Visit nextbook.org/chagall for a virtual museum of Chagall images.
240 pages, Hardcover
First published March 13, 2007
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About the author
Jonathan Wilson
86 books51 followersJonathan Wilson is a British-born writer and professor who lives in Newton, Massachusetts.
Jonathan Wilson is the author of seven books: the novels The Hiding Room and A Palestine Affair, a finalist for the 2004 National Jewish Book Award, two collections of short stories Schoom and An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble, two critical works on the fiction of Saul Bellow and most recently a biography, Marc Chagall, runner-up for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University.
Wilson also writes a column on soccer for the Internet Newspaper, The Faster Times.
Jonathan Wilson is the author of seven books: the novels The Hiding Room and A Palestine Affair, a finalist for the 2004 National Jewish Book Award, two collections of short stories Schoom and An Ambulance is on the Way: Stories of Men in Trouble, two critical works on the fiction of Saul Bellow and most recently a biography, Marc Chagall, runner-up for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and Best American Short Stories, among other publications, and he has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is Fletcher Professor of Rhetoric and Debate, Professor of English and Director of the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University.
Wilson also writes a column on soccer for the Internet Newspaper, The Faster Times.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 29, 2022
Tak się powinno pisać biografie.
June 1, 2014
Jonathan Wilson is an academic (he teaches at Tufts) who writes novels and biographies. His biography of Chagall is so detailed and insightful, that it reads like the work of the painter’s best friend and documentarian. When Wilson criticizes, it is with compassion.
Marc Chagall was born Moishe (Movcha) Shagal in Vitebsk, Belarus, on July 6, 1887. He died 97 years later. He painted “in Yiddish,” says Wilson, who points out that the figures that seem to dance on air are the embodiments of the Yiddish “luftmensch,” literally an “air person,” or a “human being in the air." One of Chagall’s paintings is called “Self Portrait With Seven Fingers.” In Yiddish, to do something with seven fingers is to do it well, nimbly, quickly.
His work was not always welcome or appreciated, but he came to international attention and commanded respect. His colleagues and peers of the period included Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, Chaim Soutine, Modigliani, Mark Rothko (né Rothkowitz), Philip Goldstein, Roman Vishniac. Chagall commanded respect in spite of anti-semitic slurs and accusations that his work was “sentimental.” Wilson addresses this last with his trademark combination of academic and worldly flair.
“A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality … has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desperately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists—think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.”
Chagall was commissioned to paint backdrops for the state Yiddish theatre of Moscow, where he painted sets for, among others, Gogol’s plays. He was deeply influence by S. Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk. In Wilson’s words: “Like Chagall in his paintings, Ansky yoked together the natural and the supernatural in his Yiddish Romeo and Juliet (or Romeo and Juliet meets The Exorcist, as one wag has described it.)”
In the works where he took on the holocaust, Chagall represented the genocide of the Jews through images of a crucified Jesus. He was widely criticized, mostly by fellow Jews, for this symbolism. But, says Wilson,
“Chagall’s appropriation of the Crucifixion of Jesus as an icon of Jewish suffering is not entirely uncommon among Jewish writers and artists in the twentieth century. It occurs, for example, in the work of the Yiddish novelist Pinchas Kahanovich, in Scholem Asch, to chilling effect in Elie Wiesel’s Night, and in Yehuda Amichai’s remarkable poem, ‘The Jewish Time Bomb.’ ”
Like many of the Jewish artists and seminal thinkers of the early twentieth century, Chagall was hunted – and haunted – by anti-semites. While in the U.S., Chagall and Virginia moved house just before the FBI came snooping for “incriminating documents.” What was Chagall’s crime? He was honorary president of the Committee for the Suppression of Anti-Semintism and the Promotion of Peace. Edgar Hoover never cottoned to him.
While Chagall came to think of France as home, his paintings are filled with images from his birthplace, his Vitebsk shtetl, home of the founder of Lubavitche chassidim, Rabbi Scheerson. But Chagall also appreciated that a Jew in France would find complete assimilation almost impossible. He said: “It is amazing the way the French resent foreigners. You live here most of your life. You become a naturalized French citizen, give them twenty paintings for their museum of modern art, work for nothing decorating their cathedrals, and they still despise you. You are not one of them. It was always like that.”
Besides, Chagall never felt as comfortable speaking French – or Russian, or English – as he did speaking Yiddish. When in New York, he read the Yiddish newspapers and hobnobbed with his Yiddish speaking bretheren.
1964 saw the premiere of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. The set designer was Boris Aronson, a Russian Jewish artist who, like Chagall, had once studied in Berlin – with the same teacher. Like Chagall, Aronson had designed backdrops for the Moscow state Yiddish theatre. Aronson’s designs for Fiddler on the Roof were a homage to Chagall, whose painting, Music, with its shtetl fiddler on the roof (in green cap and tallith), gave the musical its name. Even people who never knew of Chagall were suddenly aware of this image, which became inexorably linked with Chagall’s name.
In his paintings, Chagall memorialized shtetl life, replete with figures straight out of the Lubavitche community. He himself turned his back on religion. He married his beloved Bella, also from Vitebsk, but after her death at age 42, he became romantically involved first with Virginia (not Jewish), and then with Vava, a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity. Yet when his daughter became involved with a non-Jew, Chagall objected. Chagall, like most of humanity, was a bundle of contradictions.
Marc Chagall was born Moishe (Movcha) Shagal in Vitebsk, Belarus, on July 6, 1887. He died 97 years later. He painted “in Yiddish,” says Wilson, who points out that the figures that seem to dance on air are the embodiments of the Yiddish “luftmensch,” literally an “air person,” or a “human being in the air." One of Chagall’s paintings is called “Self Portrait With Seven Fingers.” In Yiddish, to do something with seven fingers is to do it well, nimbly, quickly.
His work was not always welcome or appreciated, but he came to international attention and commanded respect. His colleagues and peers of the period included Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, Chaim Soutine, Modigliani, Mark Rothko (né Rothkowitz), Philip Goldstein, Roman Vishniac. Chagall commanded respect in spite of anti-semitic slurs and accusations that his work was “sentimental.” Wilson addresses this last with his trademark combination of academic and worldly flair.
“A book marking the vast contribution of Jews to the history of sentimentality … has yet to be written. But in it Chagall would surely have his own chapter, not because his paintings are desperately mawkish (and after all, sentimentality is not the attribute only of weaker artists—think of Dickens or Renoir) but because he walked the tightrope that separates sentimentality from deeper, more authentic feeling better than anyone, except perhaps the great Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai.”
Chagall was commissioned to paint backdrops for the state Yiddish theatre of Moscow, where he painted sets for, among others, Gogol’s plays. He was deeply influence by S. Y. Ansky’s The Dybbuk. In Wilson’s words: “Like Chagall in his paintings, Ansky yoked together the natural and the supernatural in his Yiddish Romeo and Juliet (or Romeo and Juliet meets The Exorcist, as one wag has described it.)”
In the works where he took on the holocaust, Chagall represented the genocide of the Jews through images of a crucified Jesus. He was widely criticized, mostly by fellow Jews, for this symbolism. But, says Wilson,
“Chagall’s appropriation of the Crucifixion of Jesus as an icon of Jewish suffering is not entirely uncommon among Jewish writers and artists in the twentieth century. It occurs, for example, in the work of the Yiddish novelist Pinchas Kahanovich, in Scholem Asch, to chilling effect in Elie Wiesel’s Night, and in Yehuda Amichai’s remarkable poem, ‘The Jewish Time Bomb.’ ”
Like many of the Jewish artists and seminal thinkers of the early twentieth century, Chagall was hunted – and haunted – by anti-semites. While in the U.S., Chagall and Virginia moved house just before the FBI came snooping for “incriminating documents.” What was Chagall’s crime? He was honorary president of the Committee for the Suppression of Anti-Semintism and the Promotion of Peace. Edgar Hoover never cottoned to him.
While Chagall came to think of France as home, his paintings are filled with images from his birthplace, his Vitebsk shtetl, home of the founder of Lubavitche chassidim, Rabbi Scheerson. But Chagall also appreciated that a Jew in France would find complete assimilation almost impossible. He said: “It is amazing the way the French resent foreigners. You live here most of your life. You become a naturalized French citizen, give them twenty paintings for their museum of modern art, work for nothing decorating their cathedrals, and they still despise you. You are not one of them. It was always like that.”
Besides, Chagall never felt as comfortable speaking French – or Russian, or English – as he did speaking Yiddish. When in New York, he read the Yiddish newspapers and hobnobbed with his Yiddish speaking bretheren.
1964 saw the premiere of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway. The set designer was Boris Aronson, a Russian Jewish artist who, like Chagall, had once studied in Berlin – with the same teacher. Like Chagall, Aronson had designed backdrops for the Moscow state Yiddish theatre. Aronson’s designs for Fiddler on the Roof were a homage to Chagall, whose painting, Music, with its shtetl fiddler on the roof (in green cap and tallith), gave the musical its name. Even people who never knew of Chagall were suddenly aware of this image, which became inexorably linked with Chagall’s name.
In his paintings, Chagall memorialized shtetl life, replete with figures straight out of the Lubavitche community. He himself turned his back on religion. He married his beloved Bella, also from Vitebsk, but after her death at age 42, he became romantically involved first with Virginia (not Jewish), and then with Vava, a Russian Jew who converted to Christianity. Yet when his daughter became involved with a non-Jew, Chagall objected. Chagall, like most of humanity, was a bundle of contradictions.
January 31, 2009
Overall an easy read about a very interesting artist. I liked the way Wilson correlated the subject matter of Chagall's work to events in his life.
One of the most interesting aspects of Chagall was his identity issues which he thought were a non-issue which seem to be quite obviously issues. The use of Christian and Jewish images in his paintings is quite compelling as well as how he constantly painted images from his home village (cows, temples, shtetl, etc). Being a jew from Belarussia and how he navigated life in Europe at the time was interesting. If you like Chagall and are interested in his life and work then this is a good choice.
One of the most interesting aspects of Chagall was his identity issues which he thought were a non-issue which seem to be quite obviously issues. The use of Christian and Jewish images in his paintings is quite compelling as well as how he constantly painted images from his home village (cows, temples, shtetl, etc). Being a jew from Belarussia and how he navigated life in Europe at the time was interesting. If you like Chagall and are interested in his life and work then this is a good choice.
February 1, 2011
Another excellent book in the "Jewish Encounters" series, this is the biography of the great Russian-Jewish artist, Marc Chagall, who left Russia for Paris in 1910, fled from there in 1941 just steps ahead of the Nazis and arrived in New York City. It is, as Anita Diamant says, "an engrossing, complex and fearless tale of politics, arts, murder, sex and history (personal and global)."
August 14, 2008
Marc Chagall wore eye make-up in the 1930's when he was living in Paris.
February 12, 2025
This was such an insightful book about Chagall's life. It was fascinating to learn about a Jewish artist who created Christian iconography to express himself. If you're looking for a more in-depth history, I would recommend a different source, but this serves as a good introduction.
November 25, 2012
Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1877, in Vitebsk, a town in Belorussia. His parents were Orthodox Jews, were poor, yet his childhood was filled with a sense of stability. His father was a laborer. Chagall lived through the Russian Revolution, World War I and World War II, and was extremely cognizant of his childhood environment and what was occurring on the very streets where he grew up. His Jewish roots can be traced within the lines and strokes of his paintings.
His memories of time and place are distinct in his art, no matter the time span. He is humbled by his roots, and one can sense a longing in some of his paintings for his childhood days and his memories of home. Often you will find him depicting himself soaring or floating above the scene or setting in his paintings, often in a tallit/prayer shawl. He was determined to be a man of all seasons, a person who a Russian Jew could look up to, an individual who could appeal to anyone from anywhere.
Marc Chagall is a story that lingers in this reader’s mind. Jewish history is depicted with brilliance throughout the pages, not only through Chagall’s artistic and creative paintings, but through Jonathan Wilson’s vivid imagery and poetic prose paintings of the artist.
His memories of time and place are distinct in his art, no matter the time span. He is humbled by his roots, and one can sense a longing in some of his paintings for his childhood days and his memories of home. Often you will find him depicting himself soaring or floating above the scene or setting in his paintings, often in a tallit/prayer shawl. He was determined to be a man of all seasons, a person who a Russian Jew could look up to, an individual who could appeal to anyone from anywhere.
Marc Chagall is a story that lingers in this reader’s mind. Jewish history is depicted with brilliance throughout the pages, not only through Chagall’s artistic and creative paintings, but through Jonathan Wilson’s vivid imagery and poetic prose paintings of the artist.
July 3, 2008
A book about an artist with no pictures??? The author redeemed the book by showing a beautiful Power Point presentation and being a fantastic speaker. It was NextBook/Schoken's decision not to have pictures. The paperback will.
July 2, 2016
This book is a straight narrative of Chagall's biography, with correlations to his artistic output of each period. The writing style is clean and crisp, but not inspired nor analytical. Clearly I am not motivated by Chagall's art enough to parse this biography deeper.
April 4, 2016
A fascinating biography of my favourite artist...
April 5, 2017
Two of my favourite passages:
“It was Chagall's great talent as an artist to absorb influences without becoming a slave to them. He was not an intellectual, and he powerfully resisted ideologies and theories while, magpielike, stealing what he fancied from the various isms that surrounded him. This characteristic preserved Chagall's artistic integrity in Paris but inevitably got him into trouble in Russia after the Revolution.”
“He gathered up all the house painters in town and gave them orders to copy sketches that he had made ready for them onto huge canvases to be displayed on the walls and streets of the city and its suburbs. The result was a grand magic circus in Vitebsk: a tuba player on a green horse and blue cows flew over the heads of the celebrants while fireworks fizzed and exploded in the darkening sky above three hundred waving red banners.”
“It was Chagall's great talent as an artist to absorb influences without becoming a slave to them. He was not an intellectual, and he powerfully resisted ideologies and theories while, magpielike, stealing what he fancied from the various isms that surrounded him. This characteristic preserved Chagall's artistic integrity in Paris but inevitably got him into trouble in Russia after the Revolution.”
“He gathered up all the house painters in town and gave them orders to copy sketches that he had made ready for them onto huge canvases to be displayed on the walls and streets of the city and its suburbs. The result was a grand magic circus in Vitebsk: a tuba player on a green horse and blue cows flew over the heads of the celebrants while fireworks fizzed and exploded in the darkening sky above three hundred waving red banners.”
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews