Early years - between Russian home and Paris
Marc Chagall is without a doubt one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Born in Vitebsk in 1887, his life spanned almost 100 years. Against all odds, he attended the Imperial School for the Advancement of the Arts in Petersburg, his teacher was Leon Bakst. In 1910 a patron enabled him to travel to Paris where he would absorb the impressions of a city that was so foreign to him. He got to know, among others, Blaise Cendrars, Apollinaire, Robert Delaunay, André Lhote and Segonzac. He showed first works at the Salon des Indépendants in 1911, and met Herwarth Walden through Apollinaire in 1914. Walden organized Chagall's first solo exhibition at his STURM gallery in Berlin the same year. The encounter with French art would be formative for his style. Through the examination of the Cubists and the colors of the Orphists, he would attain his own style Between 1914 and 1922, he lived and worked in Russia as director of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vitebsk, which he had founded. He hired luminaries of the Russian avant-garde as teachers: El Lissitzky, Pougny and Malevich. Like many others, Chagall started out enthusiastically but soon had to face disappointment. So he returned to Paris in 1922. From then on he lived in France, interrupted by the years that he was fortunate enough to spend in America in order to escape Nazi persecution. So much for a brief summary of his life that is certainly incomplete, as a detailed presentation of his biography would certainly go beyond the scope of what is possible here.

For Chagall, art was a question of the soul and not the form
After his return to Paris, Chagall sensed that French art and thus ultimately European art, with Paris as its center, had been struggling for many years, especially with formal issues. No matter whether you think of David, Ingres, Cézanne and his successors. In his opinion, the Cubists also focused too much on questions of form. For him, art primarily was a question of the soul and not the form. Marc Chagall found a solution in combining the exuberant Russian narrative style with great freedom of composition. This no longer followed logically comprehensible steps and strict theories. In this respect, he perhaps was very close to the surrealist Max Ernst. In Chagall's early paintings one may still recognize Cubist and Orphist influences. But he soon broke new grounds and relatively soon found an individual style and subjects that he would vary in many different ways.

His main themes of his works
Marc Chagall's themes remain fairly constant throughout his life's work. They are strongly influenced by a life between Russia and France: village life, biblical themes, ancient legends, birth, wedding and death. His work always has a lyrical power that is fed by the traditions of the cultures to which he feels connected. The art movements that Chagall experienced and saw throughout his life were diverse. His early years in Russia and Paris influenced him the most. However, it is probably precisely because of this that he found his style and subjects at a relatively early point that enabled him to vary them in many different ways from then on. He reduced the religious, biblical motifs that he illustrated to basic existential themes, he succeeded in bringing out the essence, drama and fate of the respective story. The other two main themes are Jewish traditions and the power of love.

Chagall was married twice. He married his first wife Bella in 1915, who died of a viral infection in 1944, leaving him deeply saddened. But the artist found a new love, Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, whom he married in 1952. Vava, like Bella before, is repeatedly depicted in his paintings. As is the case with many of his portraits, Marc Chagall did not paint a portrait of the person in the true sense, but he painted a portrait of the feeling of love. The lovers, the outsized woman in red and a donkey in green, which can be interpreted as the artist's 'alter ego', appear in a dreamlike constellation. The painting lives from the density of the composition and radiant colors typical of his late creative period. With great force and deep conviction, Chagall addresses love in a way that deeply touches the observers. [EH]