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"Art seems to me above all a state of the soul," said Marc Chagall (1887 -1985), one of the most important avant-garde artists. His works fall within a range of modern styles, especially surrealism and cubism.
The Museum of Tossa de Mar preserves The Celestial Violinist, one of his most personal works, which he gave to the town's Town Hall during his stay in the summers of 1933 and 1934.
His Jewish condition would force him to undertake a pilgrimage through France and the United States, which would return him definitively to France, where he died. He left us works like Me and the Village; The violinist; The birthday; The lovers in the elderberry. In 1973 is the year of the inauguration of the Marc Chagall National Biblical Message Museum, in Nice.
Marc Chagall in Vitebsk, a small Russian village, a dreamer painter and poet who during his long life was a solitary artist, a kind of traveler between several worlds. He always had the charm of the nonconformist. His deeply religious painting expresses a great attachment to his Russian homeland. His life was spent collected between the synagogue, his home and business as he himself described in his memoir My Life, published in 1931, translated into French by his wife Bella, where his words are like his colors, happiness and melancholy, truth or dream, which take flight with the characters in his paintings.
It starts like this. "My name is Marc, I have a sensitive spirit and no money, but they say I have talent." In his book he described the great influence that the culture of Hasidic Judaism had on his life as an artist. Picasso said of him: "After Matisse, he is the only painter who truly understands what color is."
Chagall, endowed with a small scholarship, moved to Paris (1910) and immersed himself in art, began touring galleries, studied the Impressionists, saw originals by Gauguin and Van Gogh for the first time and was surprised by Matisse at the Salon. of Autumn. In Montmartre he established his first Parisian studio.
"Only the distance between Paris and my hometown kept me from returning immediately." This is how Chagall describes his difficult time in Paris in his memoirs.
Already located in La Ruche, he painted one of his main paintings from his stay in Paris, Me and the Village, a synthesis between avant-garde and popular tradition. He possesses a brilliant and unrealistic chromaticism that he learned from Fauvism and that will be a dominant feature in all of his work.
The apparent anarchy of his images are mixed without a spatial and narrative logic that justifies the superpositions. The references to the peasant world in which he spent his childhood, as well as the plant motif, are some of the images that he repeated throughout his work.
All of them have as a reference the world of their childhood, their personal memories with popular Russian folklore where dreaming and nostalgia become symbols. His painting is the embodiment of the subconscious. It is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The Violinist (1911-1914) is one of the last works of his Parisian period. The painting is structured around a red path that provides it with a spatial and scenic unity. The fiddler in red is the dominant figure who traditionally leads Jewish wedding processions. Behind, a child begs for alms. The colors provide the scene with imaginary and fantasy features, hiding real scenes from his village.
They were literary men who supported Chagall in his ideas, who shared his poetic vein, who shared the hidden meanings of things and Chagall in homage to "the café writer" painted The Poet (1911), where he shows us his assimilation of Picasso's cubism and Braque.
The solitary poet sits holding a cup of coffee in his left hand and near a bottle of brandy. The poet finds himself as if he were hearing the whispers of an inspiring muse, in an imaginary world. supernatural. His soul and his head detached from his body, as if escaping from the painting. It is exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Birthday (1915) represents the artist's own birthday. It highlights his greatest inspirations: love and fantasy. Freedom and the joy of life were truly new ideas in art. It is kept in the MOMA Museum in New York.
The Lovers in the Elderberry (1930) describes the love lyric, the delicate joy, which corresponds to his state of mind and which has its zenith in this painting. In the middle of a huge bouquet of flowers, the couple is absorbed in their timeless love. Chagall projected here two of his central motifs following an ancient pictorial language. It is exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The celeste violist is one of his most personal works that he gave to the City Council of Tossa de Mar. A happy musician flying and musicalizing a town that evokes Vitebsk, his hometown. The part that connects with Tossa are the windows, with doors of a blue characteristic of this town on the Costa Brava. Highlights the blue of the Mediterranean Sea. An optimistic and fanciful painting, a great representation of his dreams and his desires for a world at war.
In 1941, stripped of their French citizenship, the Chagalls settled in New York for several years, where in 1944 his wife Bella died. The city's Metropolitan Opera commissioned him to provide sets and figurines for Stravinsky's The Firebird.
In 1963 he was commissioned to paint the new ceiling of the Paris Opera. One of Chagall's main contributions to art has been his work with stained glass which allowed for intense, fresh colors that had the added benefit of natural light and its refraction which altered the visual effect.
Chagall with his painting gave the gloomy life of the Hasidic Jews the "romantic tones of an enchanted world." He was combining the aspects of modernism with his unique language. Through paintings and stained glass he tried to suggest "a more universal message" using Jewish and Christian themes.
In 1960 he began creating stained glass windows for the synagogue at the Hadassh Medical Center of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was decided that the twelve tribes of Israel would be filled with stained glass. He imagined the synagogue as "a crown offered to the Jewish queen” and the windows as jewels of translucent fire."
The Marc Chagall National Biblical Message Museum is located on Cimiez Hill in Nice, inaugurated in 1973. Seventeen large canvases constitute the artist's biblical and mystical message, in the strict canon of Judeo-Christian symbology.
It is the biblical story of Genesis and part of the gospels where God completes the Creation of man, the earthly paradise, the flood and five dedicated to the Song of Songs. An exterior mosaic and three large stained glass windows in the assembly hall complete the exhibition.
In the creation of man, the sky appears with yellow light and a red sun, around which the Jewish people revolve, from ancient times until the crucifixion. The lower part shows Adam in the arms of the angel, in the middle of Creation.
Marc Chagall lived his last 30 years in St. Paul de Vence, he died on March 28, 1985 and is buried there, in a cemetery overlooking the sea, under a tombstone always covered with pebbles, as Jewish custom dictates.
