Late career of Marc Chagall

With the outbreak of World War II, Chagall moved to the Loire district of France and then, as the Nazi menace for all European Jews became increasingly real, further and further south. Finally, in July 1941, he and his family took refuge in the United States; he spent most of the next few years in and around New York City. For a while Chagall continued to develop themes he had already treated in France; typical works of this period are the Yellow Crucifixion (1943) and The Feathers and the Flowers (1943). But in 1944 his wife Bella died, and memories of her, often in a Vitebsk setting, became a recurring pictorial motif. She appears as a weeping wife and a phantom bride in Around Her (1945) and, again, as the bride in The Wedding Candles (1945) and Nocturne (1947).

In 1945 Chagall designed the backdrops and costumes for a New York production of Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird. He was honoured with a large retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946 and at the Art Institute of Chicago a few months later.

In 1948 Chagall settled again in France, first in the suburbs of Paris and finally on the French Riviera at Vence and nearby Saint-Paul. Between 1953 and 1956, without forgetting his native Vitebsk, he produced a series of paintings inspired by his affection for Paris.

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.

Legacy

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.