Although labelled as a Russo-Jewish Modernist, he didn’t want to be identified with any artistic movement. He was deeply in love with his Russo-Jewish traditions and culture but, regarding both art and artist, he preferred the brand; humanist. Though it is true that he drew inspiration from the techniques of many different genera and their artists, saying that they influenced him may not ring as true as saying that they supplied him a greater set of tools. His art was more influenced by his feelings, memories and his losses as well as about his surroundings and the events of the world. His life spanned, arguably the most eventful century of human history; hence humanity and his reactions to it, generated the style that he would claim as unique to himself. He was internationally praised as a colorist. His works, brought to life all the emotion and passion of his subjects. Chagall said that Charlie Chaplin brings to film what he tries to bring to his work, that would be eloquent communication without words.
In Judaism as is the case in Islam, human beings are not permitted to paint god in a anthropomorphic fashion. Hence both Muslim and Jewish artists are limited to the use of light and color as a mechanism to show the presents of god. Many religious Jewish artists will make use of symbols, whereas many religious Muslim artist will make use of calligraphy or “beautiful writing”.
Chagall claimed that he was literally stillborn. He said that it took a while, and an immersion into ice water, for him to come to life. As a result of this he claimed his own spirituality and a plain somewhere between life and death, awake and dream, reality and fantasy, presence and non-existence. He was moved deeply by the bible’s passionate stories and poetry as well as his Jewish customs and traditions. The discipline of having to express only through color, light and symbols forged his base; becoming his primary tools of self-expression, they are both dominant and well-articulated in his work. However, he developed well beyond those restrictions. He rarely felt, or needed to observe, the limitations of religious orthodoxy in his artistic efforts. This enabled him to bring symbols, color and light to an entirely different level, expressing more completely the spirituality and passion of a humanity that he felt and believed to be within us all.
Chagall helped to define modern art and it is simply not accurate to flip that phrase. He was a spiritual and emotional medium. He possessed an amazing gift of being able to catch, in his works through self-expression, an ethereal plain between the joys, sorrows, dreams, and nightmares of our souls, and the events within the world of concrete reality; giving birth to a highbred of the emotional and the physical. Chagall’s work reacted to all his loves and despair of a century ubiquitous with both. His works captured the synagogues, churches, art, poetry, culture, folk music, people and traditions of his youth, their evaporation in the changing atmosphere and finally, the extinction of all but their memories. His work was influenced by the Czarist pogroms, WWI, the White Guard, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian civil war and the allied intervention, the famine, the new opportunities in Russia, the joys of Paris, WWII, his exile to the US, the concentration camps, the genocide, the liberation of Paris, his return to France, his travels, his romances, his losses and the reaction to his amazing volume of works across so many disciplines. This was an entire century of events, covered through nearly every artistic medium, in the colors of all the emotions on his pallet.
He painted what he felt; what moved him in the genera that could best express is inner life at any given time. He was a poet and a philosopher with the abilities to wield words as deftly as he did a paint brush. Having lived life to its fullest through times of need and plenty, of sorrow and joy, he was able to capture it all with subtlety and depth. He could capture the intimacy of a Hasidic village as well as the monumental importance of biblical scenes.
Marc Chagall was like a child; he never lost his sensitivity in the face of the most desensitizing events. A child who could express himself freely and profoundly. A child that was ever homesick for the town of his birth and the time that had effected every piece of art he had made in that century when, “humanity abandoned itself.”
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