Aziz art Augaust 2015.pdf

Marc Chagall6 July 1887 – 28 March 1985)was a Russian-French artist.21 Artcritic Robert Hughes referred toChagall as "the quintessentialJewish artist of the twentiethcentury" (though Chagall saw hiswork as "not the dream of onepeople but of all humanity"). Anearly modernist,he was associated with severalmajor artistic styles and createdworks in virtually every artisticmedium, including painting, bookillustrations, stained glass, stagesets, ceramic, tapestries and fineart prints.According to art historianMichael J. Lewis, Chagall wasconsidered to be "the last survivorof the first generation of Europeanmodernists". For decades, he "hadalso been respected as the world'spreeminent Jewish artist". Usingthe medium of stained glass, heproduced windows for thecathedrals of Reims and Metz,windows for the UN, and theJerusalem Windows in Israel. Healso did large-scale paintings,including part of the ceiling of theParis Opéra.Before World War I, he traveledbetween St. Petersburg, Paris, andBerlin. During this period hecreated his own mixture and styleof modern art based on his idea ofEastern European Jewish folkculture. He spent the wartime yearsin Soviet Belarus, becoming one ofthe country's most distinguishedartists and a member of themodernist avant-garde, foundingthe Vitebsk Arts College beforeleaving again for Paris in 1922.He had two basic reputations,writes Lewis: as a pioneer ofmodernism and as a major Jewishartist. He experienced modernism's"golden age" in Paris, where "hesynthesized the art forms ofCubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism,and the influence of Fauvism gaverise to Surrealism". Yet throughoutthese phases of his style "heremained most emphatically aJewish artist, whose work was onelong dreamy reverie of life in hisnative village of Vitebsk. "WhenMatisse dies," Pablo Picassoremarked in the 1950s, "Chagall willbe the only painter left whounderstands what colour really is".6