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The First Post (Free subscription) | 20/11/2008
"This revealing, beautifully illustrated biography is equally good on Chagall as man and artist," said Jane Stevenson in the Sunday Telegraph. Like many talented people, he was a "domestic monster" - an "abysmal" father, who dodged his own mother's funeral ("I feel life too keenly," he explained.) He was also a terrible social climber. His first wife, Bella, was a fellow Jew from Vitebsk, but...
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San Fransisco Chronicle (Free subscription) | 18/11/2008
... in 1965 - is well worth study in the 21st century. Born Moishe Shagal and raised Orthodox in a Vitebsk shtetl, Chagall came to his work from a tradition in which art was absent. Inventing a voice between St. Petersburg, Paris and Berlin, Chagall embedded images of Jewish village life sometimes literally into the center of cubist swirls and proto-surrealism, brilliantly joining narrative...
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Hamate Lemaan Shlemut Haares (Free subscription) | 11/11/2008
After Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk arrived in Eretz Yisroel with his large group of Chassidim‚a Chossid from the group came to him and complained: "I came to Eretz Yisroel because I believed that it would be easier to serve Hashem here. However‚
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Musings from a Catholic Bookstore (Free subscription) | 12/11/2008
You people of Vitebsk want to put me to death. You make ambushes for me everywhere, in the streets, on the bridges, on the highways, and in the marketplace. I am here among you as a shepherd, and you ought to know that I would be happy to give my life for you. I am [...]
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Russia News Net (Free subscription) | 14/11/2008
... St. Petersburg, where he learned about experimental theater and Gauguin. But he soon returned to Vitebsk and made his first mature work, "The Dead Man," a study of a corpse, painted from life. It was arranged like a "framed tableau," Wullschlager says. He was already seeing Vitebsk as a stage set.
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International Herald Tribune (Free subscription) | 14/11/2008
... St. Petersburg, where he learned about experimental theater and Gauguin. But he soon returned to Vitebsk and made his first mature work, "The Dead Man," a study of a corpse, painted from life. It was arranged like a "framed tableau," Wullschlager says. He was already seeing Vitebsk as a stage set.
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Scotsman.com Living - Books (Free subscription) | 15/11/2008
... outsider: Moyshe Shagal was both a Russian and a Jew from the Pale of Settlement. His home city of Vitebsk, he wrote, was "a place like no other; a strange town, an unhappy town, a boring town". The upbringing he had there was not obviously an artist's: put-upon father Khatskel worked long hours in a herring warehouse; matriarch Feiga-Ita ran a grocer's store. "He is without a doubt a great...
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New York Times (Free subscription) | 14/11/2008
... rabbis, clocks, fish, flowers, steeples — wherever he went. Chagall did acknowledge his debt to Vitebsk, his hometown in the Russian Jewish Pale. There the skyline was dotted with spires, everyone owned cows and chickens, and his father, an orthodox Jew, hauled herring for a living. Yes, all the images Chagall would turn into his private lending library came from Vitebsk. But first...
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The Telegraph (Free subscription) | 09/11/2008
... long, productive old age on the Côte d'Azur. All his life he painted the domes of his birthplace, Vitebsk, in Belarus, which were, for him, powerful symbols of his mother's love. 'If I have made pictures, it is because I remember my mother, her breasts so warmly nourishing and exalting me, and I feel I could swing from the moon,' Chagall said at 79. His young, illiterate, adoring mother,...
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eJewish Philanthropy (Free subscription) | 30/10/2008
... one another.” A few personal Limmud FSU reflections – traveling 30-hours by train to Yalta from Vitebsk, Belarus, two women, Marina Sheinkina and Olga Isser, wanted to understand Jewish tradition beyond the Judaic icons expressed in Marc Chagall’s painting. “It’s time to involve more Vitebsk Jews of different ages and backgrounds in Jewish activities in our town. We need everybody...
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The Telegraph (Free subscription) | 30/10/2008
Chagall had been his mother's first and favoured son: in adult life, he continued to claim the position of the privileged child around whom the household revolved. Vitebsk, the small Jewish town into which he was born in 1887, was an unpromising starting-place for a painter, but it had one immense advantage: men were licensed to dream, while women took care of practicalities. Chagall's vision...
