Opera Gallery presents Marc Chagall, the Poetry of Emotions, an exhibition-event dedicated exclusively to the works of the Franco-Russian artist, in Paris from March 18th to April 19th, 2023.
Opera Gallery has built up one of the most important private collections of Chagall’s work in the world, consisting of works ranging from the 1930s until Chagall’s death in 1985.
Among the twenty emblematic works on display, each bearing witness to Chagall’s intimate and personal history, the public will find the artist’s favorite themes: his muse and first companion Bella Rosenfeld, pairs of lovers – Study for The Lovers on the Bridge; Couple in the Moonlight; The Lover with the Red Profile and the Blue Donkey -, musicians – The Fiddler -, animals – The Green Donkey -, hybrid creatures, but also his childhood memories in Vitebsk, flowers – Lovers with a Bouquet -, circus scenes – Multicolored Clown -, and landscapes of exile.
Full of vivid colors and light, Marc Chagall’s works reveal the heart and soul of an artist brimming with love for everything around him.
“I love the love. Everything I paint is about love and our destiny. Love helps me find color. You could even say it finds the colour itself and I put it on the canvas. It is stronger than me and comes from the depths of my soul. That is how I see life.”
(Marc Chagall in conversation with art critic Vassili Kamenski)
The firstborn of nine children, Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Liozna, in the Vitebsk region, which he considered the “naive paradise of childhood” and which he depicted on numerous occasions in his compositions. Raised in a Chassidic Jewish family in which dreams, festivals and joy were enhanced by a perpetual wonder, Chagall turned everything he saw into a fairy tale.
Exile
The artist had a tumultuous life, punctuated by exiles and successive travels in a Europe scarred by pogroms and the Holocaust. Indeed, the development of his career and world conflicts forced him to move several times between France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. Chagall sought to infuse his works with a happiness that he hoped would become universal: religion, love and life were inexhaustible sources of joy for him, imbued with a powerful poetic aura that defined all his art: “If all life inevitably ends, we must colour it with our colours of love and hope.”
Often compared with various art movements, such as late Fauvism or nascent Cubism, Chagall did not belong to any school and worked in total freedom. He used to say, “I don’t want to be the same as others, I want to see a new world”-which is probably why the style of his compositions is so unique. In fact, his depiction of people, animals and objects often defies the laws of imagination, gravity and even logic.
Throughout his particularly rich and diverse career, Chagall took on a multitude of important commissions, both public and private. The artist created stained glass windows in Metz, Reims, Jerusalem and at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Zurich and Mainz. In addition, he painted a fresco at the Opéra National de Paris and a curtain at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He has also done mosaics-The Four Seasons, 1974, Chicago-, tapestries, including the Gobelins tapestries woven for the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), and plays such as the sets and costumes for Daphnis et Chloé at the Opéra National de Paris.
Prolific
Chagall also produced a large number of lithographs and etchings for illustrations and ceramics. After meeting Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, with whom he could converse in Russian, he also tried his hand at poetry. In 1973 the Marc Chagall National Museum was opened in Nice, France. Marc Chagall died in 1985 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he is buried, leaving behind a prolific, sometimes daring, but always exciting body of work.
His works have been and still are exhibited and retrospected worldwide and are in many prestigious public and private collections such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée du Louvre and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, to name a few.
Marc Chagall, The Poetry of Emotions
OPERA Gallery, Paris
March 18th to April 19th, 2023
Opening on March 18, from 4:30 p.m.
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