Editing Marc Chagall (section)

==Art styles and techniques==

===Color===
[[File:Chagall - Bestiaire.jpg|thumb|{{center|''[[Bestiary|Bestiaire]] et Musique'' (1969)}}]]
According to Cogniat, in all Chagall's work during all stages of his life, it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention. During his earlier years his range was limited by his emphasis on form and his pictures never gave the impression of painted drawings. He adds, "The colors are a living, integral part of the picture and are never passively flat, or banal like an afterthought. They sculpt and animate the volume of the shapes... they indulge in flights of fancy and invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones... His colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes and rhythms."<ref name=Cogniat/>

He was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors. Cogniat writes, "Chagall is unrivalled in this ability to give a vivid impression of explosive movement with the simplest use of colors..." Throughout his life his colors created a "vibrant atmosphere" which was based on "his own personal vision."<ref name=Cogniat/>{{rp|60}}

===Subject matter===

====From life memories to fantasy====
Chagall's early life left him with a "powerful visual memory and a pictorial intelligence", writes Goodman. After living in France and experiencing the atmosphere of artistic freedom, his "vision soared and he created a new reality, one that drew on both his inner and outer worlds." But it was the images and memories of his early years in Belarus that would sustain his art for more than 70 years.<ref name=Goodman/>{{rp|13}}

[[File:Chagall Circus.jpg|thumb|''The Circus Horse'']]
According to Cogniat, there are certain elements in his art that have remained permanent and seen throughout his career. One of those was his choice of subjects and the way they were portrayed. "The most obviously constant element is his gift for happiness and his instinctive compassion, which even in the most serious subjects prevents him from dramatization..."<ref name=Cogniat/>{{rp|89}} Musicians have been a constant during all stages of his work. After he first got married, "lovers have sought each other, embraced, caressed, floated through the air, met in wreaths of flowers, stretched, and swooped like the melodious passage of their vivid day-dreams. Acrobats contort themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the end of their stems; flowers and foliage abound everywhere."<ref name=Cogniat/> Wullschlager explains the sources for these images:

{{quote|For him, clowns and acrobats always resembled figures in religious paintings... The evolution of the circus works... reflects a gradual clouding of his worldview, and the circus performers now gave way to the prophet or sage in his work—a figure into whom Chagall poured his anxiety as Europe darkened, and he could no longer rely on the ''lumiére-liberté'' of France for inspiration.<ref name=Wullschlager/>{{rp|337}}}}

Chagall described his love of circus people:

{{quote|Why am I so touched by their makeup and grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons... Chaplin seeks to do in film what I am trying to do in my paintings. He is perhaps the only artist today I could get along with without having to say a single word.<ref name=Wullschlager/>{{rp|337}}}}

His early pictures were often of the town where he was born and raised, [[Vitebsk]]. Cogniat notes that they are realistic and give the impression of firsthand experience by capturing a moment in time with action, often with a dramatic image. During his later years, as for instance in the "Bible series", subjects were more dramatic. He managed to blend the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color the pictures were always at least acceptable if not powerful. He never attempted to present pure reality but always created his atmospheres through fantasy.<ref name=Cogniat/>{{rp|91}} In all cases Chagall's "most persistent subject is life itself, in its simplicity or its hidden complexity... He presents for our study places, people, and objects from his own life".

====Jewish themes====
After absorbing the techniques of [[Fauvism]] and [[Cubism]] (under the influence of [[Jean Metzinger]] and [[Albert Gleizes]])<ref>{{Cite book|last=Cooper|first=Douglas|url=https://archive.org/stream/cubistepoch00coop#page/130/mode/2up|title=The Cubist Epoch|page=130|date=1970|publisher=London: Phaidon, in association with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art & the Metropolitan Museum of Art|isbn=978-0-87587-041-0}}</ref> Chagall was able to blend these stylistic tendencies with his own folkish style. He gave the grim life of [[Hasidic Jews]] the "romantic overtones of a charmed world", notes Goodman. It was by combining the aspects of [[Modernism]] with his "unique artistic language", that he was able to catch the attention of critics and collectors throughout Europe. Generally, it was his boyhood of living in a Belarusian provincial town that gave him a continual source of imaginative stimuli. Chagall would become one of many Jewish émigrés who later became noted artists, all of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most numerous and creative minorities", notes Goodman.<ref name=Goodman/>{{rp|13}}

World War I, which ended in 1918, had displaced nearly a million Jews and destroyed most of what remained of the provincial [[shtetl]] culture that had defined life for most [[Eastern European Jews]] for centuries. Goodman notes, "The fading of traditional Jewish society left artists like Chagall with powerful memories that could no longer be fed by a tangible reality. Instead, that culture became an emotional and intellectual source that existed solely in memory and the imagination... So rich had the experience been, it sustained him for the rest of his life."<ref name=Goodman/>{{rp|15}} Sweeney adds that "if you ask Chagall to explain his paintings, he would reply, 'I don't understand them at all. They are not literature. They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me..."<ref name=Sweeney/>{{rp|7}}

In 1948, after returning to France from the U.S. after the war, he saw for himself the destruction that the war had brought to Europe and the Jewish populations. In 1951, as part of a memorial book dedicated to eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France, he wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950", which inspired paintings such as the ''Song of David'' (see photo):

{{quote|I see the fire, the smoke and the gas; rising to the blue cloud, turning it black. I see the torn-out hair, the pulled-out teeth. They overwhelm me with my rabid palette. I stand in the desert before heaps of boots, clothing, ash and dung, and mumble my [[Kaddish]]. And as I stand—from my paintings, the painted David descends to me, harp in hand. He wants to help me weep and recite chapters of Psalms.<ref name=Harshav/>{{rp|114–115}}}}

Lewis writes that Chagall "remains the most important visual artist to have borne witness to the world of East European Jewry... and inadvertently became the public witness of a now vanished civilization."<ref name=Lewis/> Although Judaism has religious inhibitions about pictorial art of many religious subjects, Chagall managed to use his fantasy images as a form of visual metaphor combined with folk imagery. His "Fiddler on the Roof", for example, combines a folksy village setting with a fiddler as a way to show the Jewish love of music as important to the Jewish spirit.

Music played an important role in shaping the subjects of his work. While he later came to love the music of Bach and Mozart, during his youth he was mostly influenced by the music within the Hasidic community where he was raised.<ref name=music>{{cite news | url=http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-music-influenced-the-art-of-marc-chagall/ | title=How music influenced the art of Marc Chagall | work=CBS News | date=7 May 2017}}</ref> Art historian Franz Meyer points out that one of the main reasons for the unconventional nature of his work is related to the [[hassidism]] which inspired the world of his childhood and youth and had actually impressed itself on most Eastern European Jews since the 18th century. He writes, "For Chagall this is one of the deepest sources, not of inspiration, but of a certain spiritual attitude... the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment of his art."<ref name=Cogniat/>{{rp|24}} In a talk that Chagall gave in 1963 while visiting the US, he discussed some of those impressions.

However, Chagall had a complex relationship with Judaism. On the one hand, he credited his Russian Jewish cultural background as being crucial to his artistic imagination. But however ambivalent he was about his religion, he could not avoid drawing upon his Jewish past for artistic material. As an adult, he was not a practicing Jew, but through his paintings and stained glass, he continually tried to suggest a more "universal message", using both Jewish and Christian themes.<ref name=Slater>Slater, Elinor and Robert. ''Great Jewish Men'', (1996) Jonathan David Publ. Inc. pp. 84–87</ref>

{{quote|For about two thousand years a reserve of energy has fed and supported us, and filled our lives, but during the last century a split has opened in this reserve, and its components have begun to disintegrate: God, perspective, colour, the Bible, shape, line, traditions, the so-called humanities, love, devotion, family, school, education, the prophets and Christ himself. Have I too, perhaps, doubted in my time? I painted pictures upside down, decapitated people and dissected them, scattering the pieces in the air, all in the name of another perspective, another kind of picture composition and another formalism.<ref name=Cogniat/>{{rp|29}}}}

He was also at pains to distance his work from a single Jewish focus. At the opening of The Chagall Museum in Nice he said 'My painting represents not the dream of one people but of all humanity'.