Bohemian in Vitebsk

J. Hoberman

  • Chagall: Love and Exile by Jackie Wullschlager
    Allen Lane, 582 pp, £30.00, October 2008, ISBN 978 0 7139 9652 4

At the time of his death at the age of 97 in 1985, Marc Chagall was, if not the world’s best-known living artist (as much trademark as painter), certainly its best loved. The School of Paris’s last surviving master was dismissed by some as a purveyor of high-class kitsch and hailed by others as one of the 20th century’s truly popular artists, but no one denied Chagall’s power as a colourist or the distinctiveness of his iconography: the embracing lovers, joyful barnyard creatures, tumbledown villages and Jewish musicians, among other free-floating symbols.

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Vol. 31 No. 7 · 9 April 2009 » J. Hoberman » Bohemian in Vitebsk (print version)
Pages 17-20 | 3800 words