Marc Chagall was born in 1887 to a poor Jewish family in Russia. He was the eldest of nine children. Chagall began to display his artistic talent while studying at a secular Russian school, and despite his father’s disapproval, in 1907 he began studying art with Leon Bakst in St. Petersburg. It was at this time that his distinct style that we recognize today began to emerge. As his paintings began to center on images from his childhood, the focus that would guide his artistic motivation for the rest of his life came to fruition. In 1910, Chagall, moved to Paris for four years. It was during this period that he painted some of his most famous paintings of the Jewish village, and developed the features that became recognizable trademarks of his art. Strong and bright colors began to portray the world in a dreamlike state. Fantasy, nostalgia, and religion began to fuse together to create otherworldly images. In 1914, before the outbreak of World War I, Chagall held a one-man show in Berlin, exhibiting work dominated by Jewish images. During the war, he resided in Russia, and in 1917, endorsing the revolution, he was appointed Commissar for Fine Arts in Vitebsk and then director of the newly established Free Academy of Art. In 1922, Chagall left Russia, settling in France one year later. He lived there permanently except for the years 1941 - 1948 when, fleeing France during World War II, he resided in the United States. Chagall's horror over the Nazi rise to power is expressed in works depicting Jewish martyrs and refugees. In addition to images of the Jewish world, Chagall's paintings are inspired by themes from the Bible. His fascination with the Bible culminated in a series of over 100 etchings illustrating the Bible, many of which incorporate elements from folklore and from religious life in Russia. Israel, which Chagall first visited in 1931 for the opening of the Tel Aviv Art Museum, is likewise endowed with some of Chagall's work, most notably the twelve stained glass windows at Hadassah Hospital and wall decorations at the Knesset. Chagall received many prizes and much recognition for his work. He was also one of very few artists to exhibit work at the Louvre in their lifetime. Marc Chagall 1887–1985 Biography Paris Through the Window (Paris par la fenêtre), 1913. Oil on canvas, 53 1/2 x 55 3/4 inches (135.8 x 141.4 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection, By gift 37.438. © 2009 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris After Marc Chagall moved to Paris from Russia in 1910, his paintings quickly came to reflect the latest avant-garde styles. In Paris Through the Window, Chagall’s debt to the Orphic Cubism of his colleague Robert Delaunay is clear in the semitransparent overlapping planes of vivid color in the sky above the city. The Eiffel Tower, which appears in the cityscape, was also a frequent subject in Delaunay’s work. For both artists it served as a metaphor for Paris and perhaps modernity itself. Chagall’s parachutist might also refer to contemporary experience, since the first successful jump occurred in 1912. Other motifs suggest the artist’s native Vitebsk. This painting is an enlarged version of a window view in a self-portrait painted one year earlier, in which the artist contrasted his birthplace with Paris. The Janus figure in Paris Through the Window has been read as the artist looking at once westward to his new home in France and eastward to Russia. Chagall, however, refused literal interpretations of his paintings, and it is perhaps best to think of them as lyrical evocations, similar to the allusive plastic poetry of the artist’s friends Blaise Cendrars (who named this canvas) and Guillaume Apollinaire. Years after Chagall painted The Soldier Drinks he stated that it developed from his memory of tsarist soldiers who were billeted with families during the 1904–05 Russo- Japanese war. The enlisted man in the picture, with his right thumb pointing out the window and his left index finger pointing to the cup, is similar to the two-faced man in Paris Through the Window in that both figuratively mediate between dual worlds— interior versus exterior space, past and present, the imaginary and the real. In paintings such as these it is clear that the artist preferred the life of the mind, memory, and magical Symbolism over realistic representation. In Green Violinist Chagall evoked his homeland. The artist’s nostalgia for his own work was another impetus in creating this painting, which is based on earlier versions of the same subject. His cultural and religious legacy is illuminated by the figure of the violinist dancing in a rustic village. The Chabad Hasidim of Chagall’s childhood believed it possible to achieve communion with God through music and dance, and the fiddler was a vital presence in ceremonies and festivals “Paris through the window” MARC CHAGALL 1913 oil on canvas, 135.8- 141.4 cm. - New York, Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org) Raised in a poor Jewish family in Russia, Marc Chagall moved to Paris in 1923, where he felt like a stranger, a foreigner “impressed by the light”, in his own words. Despite having exhibited at the “Salon des Independents” with the main artists of his era, Chagall always stayed faithful to his peculiar style, a style, according to his own words, “poetic without poetry, mystic without mysticism”. Perhaps due to this obstinacy, during his last years his oeuvre is quite irregular, but in his first years in Paris he painted masterpieces full of mystery, just as the work illustrated here. With its shining colours, strange figures and unusual composition, this painting by Marc Chagall talks us about a mysterious and indecipherable Paris in which nothing -or nobody- is really what they appear to be. Art Review | 'Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle' His First Brush With the City of Light By KAREN ROSENBERG Published: June 23, 2011 If you were an Eastern European artist in early-20th-century Paris, you were part of a close, intensely competitive network. Montparnasse was full of ramshackle studio buildings like La Ruche, or the beehive, a honeycomblike structure where the Russian- Jewish painter Marc Chagall (1887-1985) struggled alongside Modigliani, Soutine and other expats. “In La Ruche, you died or came out famous,” Chagall is said to have remarked. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris “Half-Past Three (The Poet),” which depicts the Russian poet Mazin, was one of many works that Marc Chagall created shortly after he arrived in Paris as a young Russian artist in 1911. ‘Paris Through the Window’ “Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle,” at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, tries to recapture some of this proximal magic. The show sounds very much like a reprise of last year’s “Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris” — the crucial difference being that Chagall was no Picasso. Like the Picasso exhibition, “Paris Through the Window” builds on the Philadephia Museum’s substantial collection of early Modern art. It includes a taste of Chagall at his best, as well as a smattering of Modiglianis and Soutines and a generous serving of influential if less beloved artists like Jean Metzinger, Jacques Lipchitz and Albert Gleizes. But it feels uninspired, more like a festival obligation (it was planned in conjunction with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts) than like a flash of curatorial inspiration. And it does nothing to dispute the commonly held notion that Chagall remained a small- town artist at heart, the proverbial fiddler on the roof, even when he was rubbing shoulders with the Parisian avant-garde. The show, organized by the museum’s curator of Modern art, Michael Taylor, gets off to a promising start. Early paintings by Chagall and his Cubist associates show us that he had the potential to become a much more exciting artist. Under the influence of Metzinger and Robert Delaunay, among others, he introduced fractured forms to his enchanted scenes of city life. In Chagall’s “Self-Portrait With White Collar,” which hangs next to Metzinger’s marvelous “Tea Time (Woman With a Teaspoon,)” a faceted forehead and deep under- eye hollows amount to a tentative stab at Cubism. So does the prismatic sky of “Paris Through the Window,” though the painting’s mythic creatures (among them a parachutist, a Janus figure and a cat with a human face) overshadow its formal achievements. Here too is “Half-Past Three (The Poet)” (1911), a highlight of the museum’s collection and undoubtedly one of the best paintings Chagall ever made. It shows the Russian writer Mazin scribbling lines in a notebook and raising a coffee cup to his upside-down, green- tinged head. The painting’s broken diagonals hold Chagall’s sentimental tendencies in check, evoking the bleary-eyed sensations of the wee hours. That upended head — a reference to a Yiddish idiom for madness or delirium, “fardreiter kop” — reappears in the later work “Oh God” (1919). Chagall painted it as he was being pushed out of the art school he had founded in his hometown, Vitebsk. He had quarreled with El Lissitsky and Kazimir Malevich, whose Constructivist curriculum had proved more popular with the students. Chagall had been stuck in Russia since 1914, when he went home to visit family on the eve of World War I. In his small painting “The Smolensk Newspaper,” two seated men bearing a more than casual resemblance to Cézanne’s “Card Players” react to the news of war breaking out.