Red Jew. 1915. Oil on cardbord. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a Russian-Jewish painter of the 20th Century and one of the best known representatives of the Russian Avant-Garde in the West. Chagall painted in a style all his own, combining elements of Expressionism, Symbolism, Cubism and, to a lesser degree, other Modernist art movements. A prolific and multi-faceted artist, Chagall left behind him thousands of works in many different techniques and media that have established him as one of the foremost artists of the 20th Century.
Early Life and Formative Period
Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, a city in the north of present-day Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1887.
His original name was Moshe or Moishe Shagal; "Moshe" is Hebrew for Moses, while "Shagal" is a variation of the common Jewish surname Segal or Seagal. In his papers, his name was russified by the authorities to Mark Zakharovich Shagalov. The name "Marc Chagall," by which the painter is best known, was adopted when the painter arrived in Paris and combines the "Mark" of his Russian name with the "Shagal" of his original name, and renders it in the French spelling
The Russian Empire had strong discriminatory laws against Jews that banned them from living in central Russia, confining them to the far Western territories of the Empire. There, they were also forbidden from living in the major cities and, simultaneously, prevented from owning land and living in small villages. Effectively, this confined them to the mid-sized towns, called shtetls or mestechki. Vitebsk was a typical example of this. Out of the city's 50,000 residents, over half were Jewish.
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