Product Description

"When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.” Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival. Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-coloured” czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where “you either died or came out famous”. Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Wullschlager has had exclusive access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished letters from the Chagall family collection in Paris, which are quoted here for the first time, lending Chagall's own unique voice to this account. Drawing also on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many also previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #42123 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

From the Publisher
Winner of the European Craft Prize for 2008

About the Author
Jackie Wullschlager is Chief Art Critic of the Financial Times, where she has worked since 1986. Her books include the prize-winning Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, and an acclaimed group biography of Victorian children's writers, Inventing Wonderland. She lives in London with her husband and three children.

Customer Reviews

fantastic cultural experience
This is an epic journey through the life of chagall. It is an absolutely fantastic journey which should be enjoyed by all. Anyone who does not like this book (not that I have ever met any such person) obviously has no cultural insight or intuition. This book has been shortlisted for the 2008 Whitbread Prize (results are being awaited), and considering it has been out for only a month, I think that says a lot about the quality. It is a fantastic must-read.

A Curate's Egg
This is a remarkable biography, written with the cooperation of the Chagall estate &, for the first time, compiled with rare access to Russian archives including the correspondence of Marc Chagall & his first wife. Bella was his muse & his link back to the homeland. Vitebsk was part of the Pale of Settlement for Russian Jews & the inspiration for the majority of Chagall's paintings.

Wullschlager is fulsome in her praise of Chagall's early works; hundreds up until World War Two, her descriptions are eloquent. But she is less kind about his subsequent paintings from 1940, suggesting that they are pastiches & repetitive reproductions of oft repeated themes. It is here that I take exception to her exposition. Yes: his themes - violins, Russian skylines, donkeys, goats & lovers are familiar; but they are the essence of Chagall.

Where I take exception to Wullschlager's book is in the scant coverage that she has given to his work on glass which, with the collaboration of Charles Marq, in his Rheims workshop, was to occupy the last 25 years of Chagall's life. At 73 years old Marc Chagall found a new medium into which he poured exceptional energy and love for the last quarter of his life, until his death in his 98th year. His windows, "Painting in Light" as he called it, were the culmination of his creative genius.

In a book of 522 pages we are frequently told by the writer of Chagall's parsimony when selling his lithographs. She does, however, mention his refusal of payment for any art destined for a place of worship and this goes some way to redress the balance of emphasis in this book.

A good solid biography

I was taking a step into the unknown with this biography as although I go to the famous art galleries in London I don't come across Chagall's works so I only knew of him through prints in general art histories.

I think he's coming from Vitebsk had an influence on me buying the book (as some of my grandfather's family came from there) and also the decent reviews.

I enjoyed this biography especially the first half where the experiences and physical locations are more vivid.