Word: vitebsk
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Chagall's lifelong touchstone was Vitebsk, the Russian village where he was born in 1887. His parents were Yiddish-speaking Hasidim, descended from a culture suspicious of imagery but possessing a long tradition of mysticism and of the spiritual ecstasy that courses through his art. In My Life, the lovely but unreliable memoir that he wrote when he was just 35, Chagall recalls how his family used painted canvases to protect the wooden floors of their house. "My sisters," he observes dryly, "thought pictures were made expressly for that purpose...
...Chagall returned to Russia for what he thought would be a brief visit, only to be trapped there for eight years by war and revolution. Named by the Soviets as arts commissar for Vitebsk, he headed for a time the People's School of Art, where the faculty included the avant-gardists Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. Chagall's vision of a school that would encourage every tendency ran afoul of Malevich's exclusive faith in abstraction. In time Malevich and his followers seized the place in the name of Suprematism and its militant modernism...
...failing to distribute the drug nevirapine to HIV-positive mothers on a national basis. TAC says such action might save the lives of about 35,000 newborn babies a year. UNITED STATES Make Peace or We'll Keep This Chagall Shortly after Marc Chagall's Study for "Over Vitebsk" vanished from Manhattan's Jewish Museum on June 7, the museum received a letter from the "International Committee for Art and Peace." It said the oil painting, valued at $1 million, would not be returned until Israel and the Palestinians make peace. Museum officials are taking the demand seriously. If only...
Living conditions for the troops are grim. Officers stationed in the Ukrainian town of Vitebsk have set up housekeeping in a stable. Soldiers in what was then called the Leningrad Military District built pigsties and planted vegetable gardens last spring so they would be assured of having food this winter. Barracks across the country have run out of new clothing, as well as medical supplies, parachutes and gasoline...
Chagall's was a textbook case of the way some artists receive their subject matter, their grammar of signs, in childhood. He was a child of the Russian ghetto, born in the town of Vitebsk in 1887; his father was a herring packer, his grandfather a cantor and kosher butcher, his uncle an amateur violinist. The imagery of music and shtetl folklore, mingled with the face of his childhood sweetheart (and future wife), Bella Ro- senfeld, furnished the unaltering ground of his work for 80 years, long after the close-knit and weak little societies it represented had been incinerated...