Chagall: A Biography

This thorough exploration of celebrated postmodernist painter Chagall begins with his 1887 birth in Vitebsk, a small Jewish town in Russia that he would repeatedly return to, both literally and artistically. He immigrated to Paris in 1911, where he soaked up Impressionism and identified immediately with Gauguin and Picasso's Cubism. Returning to Vitebsk in 1914, moments before the beginning of the Russian Revolution, Chagall was initially prized by the Bolsheviks, who wanted to put him in charge of the visual arts department in the Soviet education agency. Chagall declined, helping instead to establish the Vitebsk People's Art College, but the Bolshevik obsession with ""peasant art"" and the increasingly ominous political climate sent Chagall, along with his wife Thea and daughter Ida, back to Paris. Though the move proved to be Chagall's big break, the transformation of Vitebsk and general ruin of Russia weighed heavily on him. Chagall's life, talent and times are documented meticulously by biographer Wullschlager (author of 2001's Hans Christian Andersen), producing a complete portrait of an inspiring, complicated artist who merged French and Russian sensibilities, invoked ""the concrete village disposition... of Vitebsk and the global cosmic one of Russian abstraction,"" and suffered as both victim and survivor of Fascism's first wave. 32 pages color illustrations, 155 b&w illustrations.