Chagall’s Daphnis and Chloé at the AGA: Making the Everyday Iconic

Chagall’s Daphnis & Chloé at the AGA: Making the Everyday Iconic

By Becky Rynor, National Gallery of Canada on October 29, 2013

Marc Chagall (French - Russian, 1887 – 1985)

The Trampled Flowers (c. 1956–61, printed 1961

Marc Zakharovich Chagall (1887 – 28 March 1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.

Chagall saw his work as "not the dream of one people but of all humanity. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.

Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is" More on Marc Zakharovich Chagall

The exhibition Chagall: Daphnis & Chloé is a captivating love story, a peek into Marc Chagall’s personal life, and a lithographic opus considered to be the artist’s most important graphic work.
“They are incredible works of lithography,” says Kristy Trinier, curatorial liaison at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton, where the series—on loan from the National Gallery—is on view until 16 February 2014... More on The exhibition

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