Marc Chagall – Pictorial worlds

With over 120 paintings, drawings and prints, the exhibition explores the creative pairings and interrelationships between fine art and literature in the work of Marc Chagall. The American writer Henry Miller called him a ‘poet with the wings of a painter.’

The painter-poet Chagall wrote his autobiography ‘My Life’ in his early 30s and provided the work with illustrations that paint a humorously tender picture of his Belarusian homeland and his relatives.

Throughout his life, he paints with words and sounds and utilises the imagery of language. His Yiddish mother tongue is often the source of inspiration for the motifs in his paintings. Writer Leo Koenig, a friend of the artist, states: ‘Chagall sees with the help of or through the Yiddish language.’

Chagall, a writer and poet, was in creative dialogue with great writers. In his adopted home of France in the mid-1920s, he illustrated the Russian provincial farce ‘The Dead Souls’ by Nicolai Gogol. The fables of the French poet Jean de la Fontaine were given a freshness and immediacy in his pictorial direction that made us forget that they had already been illustrated by countless artists before him.

The artist returned to France from exile in America in 1948 and rediscovered the metropolis on the Seine for himself and his art in a magnificent cycle of pictures. With ‘Poèmes’ in 1968, he created a Gesamtkunstwerk of text and image by creating coloured woodcuts to his own poems. Chagall’s pictures reveal themes and motifs that also appear in his poems, but the pictures do not illustrate his texts. In his understanding, both art forms are complementary, complementing each other in a creative dialogue: ‘Perhaps I paint because it replaces the words that I lack,’ he wrote to his friend, the writer and publicist Jean Paulhan.

In addition to numerous large-format paintings in opulent colours, over forty sketches by Chagall that have never before been shown to the public will also be on display. The works allow intimate insights into the working methods of this greatest colour virtuoso of the 20th century. The presentation thus entices visitors with some unknown facets of the supposedly world-famous artist.

The exhibited works by Chagall from over 40 creative years make it visible and tangible that he wrote with a brush and painted with words throughout his life. Text and image are the two indispensable forms of expression in which his clairvoyant vision of the world is concretised in ever new visual languages.