CHAGALL and the Russian Avant-Garde

The Art Gallery of Ontario's exhibition Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde, on view from October 18, 2011, through January 15, 2012, is drawn from the collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibition examines how Chagall's Russian heritage influenced and informed his artistic practice, illustrating how he at turns embraced and rejected broader movements in art history as he developed his widely beloved style. In all, there are 118 pieces from a broad array of media, including painting, sculpture, works on paper, photography, and film. The 32 works by Chagall appear alongside those of other visionaries of Russian modernism, including Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Sonia Delaunay, and Vladimir Tatlin. "From cubo-futurism and constructivism to folk art and expressionism, Chagall's influences are as wide-ranging and divergent as his work is boldly original and singularly imaginative," says Elizabeth Smith, the AGO's executive director of curatorial affairs. "This exhibition encourages new perspectives on Chagall's artistic development, and offers a comprehensive presentation of outstanding artwork by the twentieth century's most imaginative and engaging Russian artists." In the early 1900s, against a backdrop of social change, war, and revolution, a generation of Russian artists sought to make a new kind of art that was powerful, authentic, and modern. While some turned to peasant subjects and folk art for inspiration, Marc Chagall made paintings that evoked his Jewish roots, his family, and his inner life. This exhibition explores for the first time the relationship between Chagall and his Russian contemporaries, tracing their paths from Russia to France and Germany and back again. It highlights their shared sources of inspiration, the way they embraced new artistic directions before and during World War I, and how, fuelled by the Russian Revolution of 1917, many turned to art as an engine of radical social change. The exhibition also reveals how the artists forged unique contributions to modern art, as their paths diverged. From the drab surroundings of the Jewish quarter in the city of Vitebsk in Belarus, Chagall created a highly personal style of modern art. Yet his themes of love, loss, joy, memory, and family are universal. Chagall combined real and dream worlds into richly coloured fantasies where people fly and animals cavort. Over a long life spent mostly in exile in France, Chagall continually expressed deep longing for the Russia and Vitebsk of his childhood. Until his death at age 97, he sustained an almost mystical union with this special place and time.