Editorial Reviews

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival.

Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.

His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists—the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime.

Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.

Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

Customer Reviews

Chagall: the artist and the man, 2008-12-21
by Isabel Turrent De Krauze (Mexico City)

This is an excellent book! Deep, full of insights on Chagall's art and life and beatifully written.Jackie Wullschlager does for Chagall what John Richardson has done for Picasso.She recovers Chagall,the artist and the man, with his genius and charm, his weaknesses and failures.From the pages of the book emerge with astonishing detail the worlds in which Chagall grew: tha vanished worlds of the Jews who lived on the Russian Pale of Settlement and of tsarist Russia.Wullschlager recovers Chagall's beloved Vitebsk, the Russian creative artistic boom after 1917 and how it was destroyed by Stalin in the thirties.The second part of the book follows Chagall in exile: his women, his family life and his amazing success in the West.It is a wonderful book.

Out of Vitebsk, 2008-12-08
by Christian Schlect (Yakima, Washington/USA)

People who enjoy the art created by Marc Chagall certainly will appreciate this fine biography. (However, it is neither an in-depth review of all his individual works of art nor, indeed, of his lasting place in the greater world of art history.)

The informed author, Jackie Wullschlager, helps the reader to understand Chagall by explaining his trying start in the backwater Russian town of Vitebsk, his deep Jewish heritage, and his darting amongst and away from the horrific European upheavals of the first half of the last century.

Ms.Wullschlager is especially informative about the four women who are vital to an understanding of Chagall's adult life: Bella, Virginia, Vava, and his daughter Ida.

Like many great artists, Chagall's family life and politics were often a mess. He was a flawed person. But his early paintings and late stained-glass windows remain, and they continue to speak for themselves.

Fine biography, 2008-11-30
by drkhimxz (Freehold, NJ, USA)

A fine biography, the best from the generation which did not know Chagall personally. To what extent the weakness of relying on the perceptions and judgments of others is offset by the objectivity of having had no contact positive or negative with the subject is a matter for experts on Chagall and historiographers, not the lay reader. Most should find this as detailed and objective-seeming as the lay reader needs. Her interweaving of social, psychological and aesthetic observations are quite satisfying.
To take up an issue raised by one of the previous reviewers, this is not meant to be a monograph with picture by picture analysis. One should look elsewhere for that. However, it may prove legitimately annoying, even to a reader with appropriate expectations, that so many pictures are discussed which either are omitted from the volume or appear distant from the text in which they are mentioned with no easy way to reference them while reading.
For me that was a minor annoyance since I do have volumes of his pictures; others may find it more frustrating. As I have said, I think the lay reader will easily take it in stride in view of the quality of the book.
I should add that some people may find disturbing even this discreet treatment of what life for an artist, actor, writer, in Russia and the later Soviet Union, could be like, for persons born of Jewish heritage, in the twentieth century, where discrimination, torture and murder were the order of the day, particularly in the era of the Russian Stalin and the German-Austrian Hitler. Yet without some such knowledge, the artistic responses of the survivors, like Chagall, can never be understood.

Painter in Words..., 2008-11-21
by Deborah S. Forbes (Los Angeles, CA)

Chagall: A Biography The author has both a gifted ear and a gifted eye. She is able to contextualize Chagall's art, as all good biographers' must, from tsarist Russia catapulting toward revolution and the diaspora of Russian Jews into Europe amidst the swirling decades leading up to the rise of Hitler while paying close attention to the exceptionality of a great artist tested by these times. It is a book I relished reading every word of. I've already recommended it to friends. Lovingly researched, comprehensive and thoughtful in searching out the motivations of an artist and recreation of that experience, beautifully written, it is the best read I've enjoyed in a long time.

Life and Art Apart, 2008-10-23
by Grant Barber (scituate, MA)

This biography, pitched as doing for Chagall what Richardson did with Picasso, is instead a disappointment. There are lots of scaled down color plates/reproductions of paintings...lots. They are in groupings throughout the book. The words tell about Chagall's social mileau: who he knew, was romantically involved with, what artists were friends and rivals, what places he went during historically tumultuous times. The paintings reproduced and the words do not refer to one another. Little insight into what paintings arose out of what passions, interests, changes in his life. One telling way to see this: usually color plates are numbered so that the text can refer to them; the plates in this book are not numbered. It's this weird gulf between life and art that begs for connections not here made.