Chagall was prolific for the last 30 years of his life, continuing to paint on canvas while completing many large public projects in other media. He mastered the difficult art of stained glass in the late 1950s, and he designed a number of windows at international locations such as the Cathedral of Metz in France (1958–60), the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1960–61), the United Nations building in New York (1964), and the Art Institute of Chicago (1977). His stained-glass windows are often considered to be some of the strongest work of his late career; the medium's capacity for brilliant colour was perfectly suited to his magical imagery.
Chagall also remained involved in theatre design, completing a number of projects for the Paris Opéra and the New York Metropolitan Opera, including his highly regarded set and costume designs for the 1967 production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. In 1973 the Museum of the Marc Chagall Biblical Message was dedicated at Nice, France, and in 1977 France honoured him with a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in Paris.
Assessment
Chagall's repertory of images, including massive bouquets, melancholy clowns, flying lovers, fantastic animals, biblical prophets, and fiddlers on roofs, helped to make him one of the most popular major innovators of the 20th-century School of Paris. He presented dreamlike subject matter in rich colours and in a fluent, painterly style that—while reflecting an awareness of artistic movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and even abstraction—remained invariably personal. Although critics sometimes complained of facile sentiments, uneven quality, and an excessive repetition of motifs in the artist's large total output, there is agreement that at its best it reached a level of visual metaphor seldom attempted in modern art.
Roy Donald McMullen Ed.
Additional Reading
Sidney Alexander, Marc Chagall (1978, reprinted 1989), is an excellent biography. Critical works include Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall (1964; originally published in German, 1961); Werner Haftmann, Marc Chagall (1972, reissued 1998; originally published in German, 1972); Jean Cassou, Chagall, trans. from French (1965), an easily accessible work, emphasizing the painter's aesthetic and philosophical outlook; Susan Compton, Chagall (1985), an exhibition catalog; Aleksandr Kamensky, Chagalclass="underline" The Russian Years, 1907–1922 (1989; originally published in French, 1988); and Andrew Kagan, Marc Chagall (1989).
Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich
▪ Russian artist
born Nov. 23 [Dec. 5, New Style], 1891, St. Petersburg, Russia
died Dec. 3, 1956, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.
Soviet painter, sculptor, designer, and photographer, an important member of the Constructivist movement.
Rodchenko studied art at the Kazan School of Art in Odessa from 1910 to 1914 and then went to Moscow. He soon abandoned a Futurist style of painting in favour of a completely abstract, highly geometric style using a ruler and compass. His first major show was part of an exhibition organized in Moscow in 1916 by Vladimir Tatlin, and in 1918 Rodchenko presented a one-man show in Moscow. In the latter year he painted a series of black-on-black geometric paintings in response to the famous “White on White” painting of his rival, Kazimir Malevich. In 1919 Rodchenko began to make three-dimensional constructions out of wood, metal, and other materials, again using geometric shapes in dynamic compositions; some of these hanging sculptures were, in effect, mobiles.
Rodchenko led a wing of artists in the Constructivist movement—the Productivist group—who wanted to forge closer ties between the arts and industry and to produce works that they considered more appropriate in the daily lives of worker-consumers. He thus renounced easel painting in the 1920s and took up other art forms, among them photography; poster, book, and typographic design; furniture design; and stage and motion-picture set design. He held various government offices concerned with art-related projects, helped to establish art museums, and taught art.
Constructivism
▪ art
Russian Konstruktivizm
Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the “painting reliefs”—abstract geometric constructions—of Vladimir Tatlin (Tatlin, Vladimir Yevgrafovich). The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner (Pevsner, Antoine) and Naum Gabo (Gabo, Naum) joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was “to construct” art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.
Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko (Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich) and El Lissitzky (Lissitzky, El). Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and later in the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy (Moholy-Nagy, László), who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Nazi interference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles. See also Bauhaus; Stijl, De; Suprematism.
Benois, Alexandre
▪ Russian artist
Russian in full Aleksandr Nikolayevich Benois
born May 4 [April 21, old style], 1870, St. Petersburg, Russia
died Feb. 9, 1960, Paris
Russian theatre art director, painter, and ballet librettist who with Léon Bakst and Sergey Diaghilev cofounded the influential magazine Mir iskusstva (“World of Art”), from which sprang the Diaghilev Ballets Russes.
Benois aspired to achieve a synthesis of new western European trends and certain elements of traditional Russian folk art; Mir iskusstva, established in 1899 in St. Petersburg, attacked the low artistic standards of the realist Peredvezhniki Society and the deadening influence of the Russian Academy and stressed individualism and artistic personality. The magazine, which he coedited until 1904, soon exerted great influence on stage design.
Benois began his career (c. 1901) at the Mariinsky Theatre, St. Petersburg, as scenic designer for the ballets Sylvia and Cupid's Revenge. When the Diaghilev Ballets Russes opened in 1909, Benois designed decor and costumes for, among others, Les Sylphides (1909), Giselle (1910), and Petrushka (1911), on which he collaborated with Igor Stravinsky. His later works include grand designs for La Valse (1929, Ida Rubinstein Company), The Nutcracker (1940, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo), and Graduation Ball, for which he also wrote the libretto (1957, London Festival Ballet). Among his writings are Reminiscences of the Ballet Russe (1941) and Memoirs (1960). Benois's collaboration with Stravinsky and Michel Fokine presented some of the greatest dance drama in history and helped found modern ballet.
Goncharova, Natalya
▪ Russian artist
Russian Nataliya Sergeyevna Goncharova, Goncharova also spelled Gontcharova
born June 4, 1881, Ladyzhino, Russia
died Oct. 17, 1962, Paris
innovative Russian painter, sculptor, and stage designer who was important as a founder, with Mikhail Larionov, of Rayonism (c. 1910) and as a designer for the Ballets Russes.