Just a small part from my presentation - Chagall

•Chagall’s life trajectory illustrates his triple-hyphenated liminality, which inhabited and embodied many geographical but also social and psychological milieus. His brilliant art became a testimony to an existential Jewish displacement. He aimed to break his exilic liminality through his brilliant art. His art was his testimony to memory, love, and the means for long and successful survival. His often-suspended objects are testimony to his own floated “in-betweenness.” His art was often an act of resistance.

Wherever Chagall went, he carried Vitebsk with him

It articulates Chagall’s own wanderings. It includes an old man carrying the memory of his home on his bended back. This painting appears prophetic, predicting Chagall’s own wandering from Vitebsk to St. Petersburg, to Paris, back to Russia, to Berlin, again to Paris, Palestine, Vichy, France, New York City, upstate New York, again to France, and his final home in the French Riviera.

•1887 – born

•1903 – started studying with Yehuda (Yuri) Pen, a classical portrait and genre painter

•1906 – moved to Saint Petersburg

•1906-08 – studied at the School of the Imperial Society for the Promotion of the Arts

•1909 – met his future wife, Bella (Bertha) Rosenfeld

•1910 – first move to France (Paris)

•1910-14 – French Jewish motifs increasingly appear in Chagall’s compositions

•1914- first solo exhibition in Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin – 40 paintings and 160 drawings were exhibited. Many of these works were acquired by German collectors

•1914 – traveled to Vitebsk

•1915 – exhibited his work The Year 1915 at the Michailova Art Salon in Moscow (married Bella and settled down in St. Petersburg, now called Petrograd)

•1914-22 – stayed in Russia because of the First World War

•1917 – returned to Vitebsk

•1918 – accepted the position of commissar of Visual Arts

•1919 – Academy opened in Vitebsk. After disagreement with Kazimir Malevich (a Russian avant-garde artist), he left the Academy

•1922 – left Russia for good and moved to Berlin

•1923 – temporarily moved to France, started working on The Falling Angel

•1924 – Chagall’s 122 works are exhibited in Paris

•1925 – Chagall’s paintings are exhibited in Germany

•1926 – Chagall’s first exhibition in the U.S.

•1930 – Chagall observes the increased antisemitism in Germany and reacts with a drawing of the crucifixion of Christ

Chagall reacts to Adolf Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany with the painting evocatively called Solitude (1933-34). This painting manifests his concerns and powerlessness in light of the ensuing changes. An angel hovers over a burning town (in the background).

Chagall’s White Crucifixion 1938 manifests his feeling of despair. This painting is inspired by events Chagall observed: Jews fleeing from the various pogroms and deportations. Chagall felt that his paintings of Jesus should not be limited to Jews, but to Christians for whom the language of crucifixion is symbolic and familiar. The goal was to trouble Christian consciousness.

Pinch of Snuff (1912) - another painting defamed by the Degenerate Art

In 1933, the Nazis exhibited this painting of a rabbi enjoying a recreational snuff while studying Talmud with a sign: “Taxpayer, you should know how your money is spent.”