Marc Chagall — painter with roots in the Russian Empire
Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal on 7 July 1887 in Liozna, near Vitebsk, in the Vitebsk Governorate of the Russian Empire, the eldest of nine children of a Hasidic Jewish family. His father worked for a herring merchant and his mother kept a small shop. He grew up in Vitebsk, where about half the population was Jewish, and the town, its wooden houses, fiddlers, animals and synagogues became the lasting vocabulary of his painting.
He studied briefly with the local painter Yehuda Pen, then in St Petersburg, where Jews needed permission to live, at the school of the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts and under Léon Bakst. In 1910 a patron's stipend took him to Paris, where he lived in the artists' colony of La Ruche and absorbed Cubism and Fauvism while painting Vitebsk from memory in works such as I and the Village (1911).
He returned to Vitebsk in 1914 for what was meant to be a short visit, married Bella Rosenfeld, and was kept there by the war. After the revolution he was appointed commissar of arts for the Vitebsk region and in 1919 founded the Vitebsk People's Art School, inviting El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich to teach; their differences with him led him to leave in 1920. In Moscow he painted the murals for the State Jewish Chamber Theatre. In 1922 he left Soviet Russia, by way of Berlin, for Paris.
He became a French citizen in 1937. In 1941, as a Jew in Vichy France, he was brought to the United States through the rescue network of Varian Fry; Bella died there in 1944. He returned to France in 1948 and settled in the south.
His later work extended to stained glass, mosaics, tapestries, ceramics and theatre design: the ceiling of the Paris Opera (1964), murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York, windows for the Hadassah Medical Center synagogue in Jerusalem, for cathedrals in Reims and Metz, and for the United Nations. The National Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message opened in Nice in 1973.
That year, at eighty-five, he visited the Soviet Union for the first time since 1922, for an exhibition at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, and signed the Moscow theatre murals he had painted half a century earlier. He did not go to Vitebsk. He died at Saint-Paul-de-Vence on 28 March 1985, aged ninety-seven.
"Chagall emigrated from Vitebsk to Paris in 1910, fleeing limited artistic opportunity and antisemitism."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Vitebsk (Belarus)
Raised in a Yiddish-speaking shtetl under the Russian Empire, Chagall drew lifelong inspiration from Vitebsk's streets, synagogues, and his parents Khatskl and Feiga-Ita's devout world. That village never left his canvas.
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Vitebsk (Belarus). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I am a painter from Vitebsk. That little town has formed me just as much as Paris."