Word: vitebsk
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Icons of Youth. Such magnificence is a far cry from the provincial Russian ghetto town of Vitebsk in which Chagall grew up, the eldest among eight sisters and one brother. To support the family, his father manhandled herring barrels for a livelihood. Life was harsh in Vitebsk, but he remembers his father, who changed his name from Segal to Chagal (Marc added the second l for euphony in French), as a good provider, a "simple heart, poetic and muted." Sheltered by the Jewish commandment against graven images, the young dreamer never saw so much as a drawing until...
Patriotic Bunting. Chagall continued back to Vitebsk from Berlin, then war broke out leaving his work cached in Paris and Berlin. Once home, he married his childhood sweetheart, the darkly sensual Bella Rosenfeld, Moscow-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant. It was the great love of his life, and he celebrated it in his exuberant 1918 Double Portrait with a Wineglass, in which a violet-stockinged Bella holds the artist up in the air, lifting him joyously above the streets, while an angel representing their daughter Ida hovers overhead...
...that same year, Chagall was made commissioner of fine arts in Vitebsk by the newly formed Soviet government, and as a commissar he rapidly demonstrated that he was a divine idiot. He called for "revolutionary painters" and peppered the local party press with commissarty exhortations. His vision of the revolution was to make "ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator." Imagining that all the house painters of his native town were repressed artists, he spurred them on to decorating its drab buildings with folk imagery. When his superiors arrived from Moscow to find the walls covered...
...Soviet critics, too, were soon after Chagall's hide, dubbing his misbegotten revolution in art a "mystic and formalistic bacchanal." But the purge came from the quarter he least expected. He had hired two painters, Malevich and Lissitzky, members of the suprematist school of painting, to teach in Vitebsk's Free Academy. One day he returned from Moscow to find that they had taken over the school, and based its new curriculum on their brand of geometrical abstraction and pure objectivity...
...Jewish religion forbids portraying human images in religious art. But Chagall has populated his Bible land with swirling stars, delicate flowers and prancing animals ever since he was a boy singing in the synagogue of Vitebsk. To these personal images, Chagall added clues he found in Moses' instructions in Exodus that a dozen precious gems be engraved with the names of the twelve tribes. Chagall suffused each window with a single brilliant color on which he painted Joseph's description of the tribes of Israel found in Genesis and Deuteronomy, i.e., Naphtali is described as "a hind...