Paris Through the Window

Marc Chagall arrived in Paris in May 1911 and for the next four years lived and worked at a studio complex called the La Ruche (the beehive), so named because of its distinctive cylindrical shape and honeycomb-like maze of artists’ studios. Located on the southwestern fringes of Montparnasse, La Ruche was a three-story-high building with a central staircase and studios radiating out from its core. La Ruche opened in 1902 and, since the rent was minimal and artists’ models were supplied free of charge, it quickly became a thriving artists’ community, with its own theater and exhibition schedule.

By the time Chagall moved there, La Ruche had a large population of Eastern European artists who had moved to Paris to discover the most recent trends in modern art. Among the other artists to live or frequent La Ruche between 1910 and 1914 were Alexander Archipenko, Moïse Kisling, Moïse Kogan, Jacques Lipchitz, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine. Many of these émigré artists were also attracted to the religious tolerance of Paris, which provided a relatively safe new working environment free from the pogroms and persecution that their Jewish families had endured for generations in their former homelands of Russia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries. The French artist Fernand Léger also worked at La Ruche during this time, as did the Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani, whose libertine behavior made him one of the most colorful personalities of this bohemian enclave.

These first years in Paris found Chagall nestled in a vibrant community of creative and likeminded artists, many of whom sought to develop unique approaches to painting or sculpture by blending their own experiences and cultural backgrounds with the latest advances in modern art. Cubism was at the time foremost amongst such progressive movements, and Chagall quickly internalized its syntax of refracted light and geometric form, reconciling it with the artistic training he had received in Russia. In the 1911 painting Half-Past Three (The Poet), he transforms a scene from everyday life at La Ruche--where friends frequently visited his studio to talk or share a drink, even in the early hours of the morning--into a dazzling masterpiece of striking color and dynamic rhythm.

In 1916, while living in his native Russia, Marc Chagall was invited to create a series of large-scale murals of religious festivals for a Jewish secondary school adjacent to the main synagogue in Petrograd (formerly Saint Petersburg). Purim and Man with Lulav are important studies for this never-executed mural cycle, which would have allowed the artist to paint scenes evocative of his childhood as a Hasidic Jew in Vitebsk. Bright, warm colors and striding figures of grand proportion are the hallmark of such studies. Chagall also eschewed the Cubist fragmentation he had experimented with in Paris in favor of an easily comprehensible, faux-naïf style, which he probably felt was more suitable for schoolchildren. Unfortunately, at the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Chagall had to abandon the mural commission--his first for a Jewish organization--so that he and his wife could return to the relative calm of Vitebsk.

Twenty years later, political unrest would again alter the fate of Chagall’s Purim. The study was seized by Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Party from the walls of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany, and shipped to Munich for inclusion in the state-sponsored exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art). This exhibition--seen by more than three million people during its four-year tour of Germany, Austria, and Poland--used Nazi slogans and anti-Semitic captions to link modern art with social degeneracy and political subversion. Because of its Jewish theme, as well as its expressive use of non-naturalistic color and scale, Purim was featured in the exhibition and the related press as a paradigm of the art that the Nazi’s authoritarian agenda sought to repress.

In 1941, the same year that Entartete Kunst ended its tour, Chagall was able to flee France for the safety of New York. He continued to paint and make prints, as he had in Paris, but much of his work also dealt with the extreme danger and persecution confronting the Jewish people. One project from this period was a set of illustrations for the book Burning Lights, a memoir by Chagall’s wife Bella about her Jewish upbringing. His drawings of religious holidays and festivals appear based on his memory of works like Purim and Man with Lulav, thus preserving the legacy of his never-realized Petrograd mural commission.

In September 1923, after nearly a decade of living and working in his native Russia, Marc Chagall returned to Paris at the request of the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned the artist to create illustrations for new editions of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls and Les Fables by Jean de La Fontaine. The project dominated Chagall's work over the next decade, as seen in The Watering Trough, 1923, where a bent-over woman and grinning pig share the sense of otherworldly fantasy and charm that Chagall similarly expressed in the gouaches and etchings that he made for the book commissions.

Throughout this period of prodigious painting and printmaking, Chagall once again found himself at home in the community of artists, writers, and musicians that thrived in Montparnasse during the first half of the twentieth century. In 1925, the noted French art critic André Warnod coined the term "School of Paris" to describe this eclectic, cosmopolitan group of foreign-born painters and sculptors whose number included Chagall and his former La Ruche colleagues Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine, as well as other Montparnasse artists, such as Louis Marcoussis, Chana Orloff, and Jules Pascin. Rejecting the widespread notion that this foreign "invasion" represented a threat to French tradition, Warnod highlighted instead the profound contributions that these expatriate artists had made to modern art and French culture.

By the 1930s, Warnod's unwavering critical support of Chagall and other School of Paris artists took on a sense of urgency amidst a rising tide of anti-Semitism and xenophobia sweeping across Europe, which would culminate in World War II and the Holocaust. Like many Jewish artists, including Kisling, Lipchitz, and Zadkine, Chagall was forced to flee his beloved Paris. Leaving just months before the German occupation, he first traveled south to Gordes, in the designated Free Zone, and then to the port city of Marseilles. There, on April 9, 1941, he was arrested by police from the pro-Nazi Vichy government, but was released after his friends threatened to create an international scandal by contacting the New York Times. With direct assistance from Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the director of the Museum of Modern Art, and funds donated by numerous individuals--including Louise and Walter Arensberg, who had recently acquired the artist's Half-Past Three (The Poet)--Chagall secured an exit visa that brought him and his family safely to the United States, where they arrived on June 21, 1941.