Curated by Ingried Brugger
To look closely at Marc Chagall’s Russian years is to immerse oneself in the vivid passions and relentless creativity of the artist, whose visual vocabulary from 1907 to 1922 oscillated between the pictorial richness of rural Russian-Jewish culture and the painterly inventions of numerous avant-gardes. In this exhibition, some eighty masterworks, which include the complete Chagall collection of the State Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, shed light on the artist’s attempts to balance his characteristically unorthodox style, the abstract forms of Cubism, and the colors of Fauvism. Richly crafted monumental sets from 1920 for the State Jewish Chamber Theater in Moscow, indicative of Chagall’s renunciation of the abstract avant-garde, promise to be a highlight of the exhibition.
