2024-04-23
In 2021, the National Museum in Warsaw completed an unprecedented purchase of works by the Jewish painter Marc Chagall. From April to July of this year, you can visit the exhibition of the outstanding painter's works, getting acquainted with as many as fourteen pieces distinguished by their excellent conservation condition. On this occasion, we decided to introduce our readers to the profile of this remarkable artist.
Marc Chagall is a painter from Vitebsk, who created lyrical paintings full of metaphorical imagery. His works are also characterized by the influence of such styles as surrealism and cubism, which in the later stages of his career played an extremely important role, providing the artist with the position of the leading representative of this trend in the canon of 20th century art. In his works, Chagall willingly and frequently returned to his childhood, which he recalled as a blissful, imaginative period in his life.
In Chagall's works sensitivity to the surrounding world is visible to the naked eye. The painter was inspired by both nature and culture – the city, placing on his paintings landscapes and architecture characteristic for his native Vitebsk. Urban motifs present in his works are also connected with the artist's stay in Paris, at that time the capital of the artistic avant-garde, brimming with innovative art trends, far exceeding academic conventions.
Undoubtedly, Chagall valued human relations too, as they were a source of inspiration for him equally important as the idyllic memories of his early years. The person who appears in his paintings very often is a woman considered to be his greatest love - Bella Rosenfeld, with whom the artist happily spent many years of his life, until the premature death of the writer.
Thanks to the transaction which the National Museum in Warsaw made with Kornfeld, a renowned Swiss auction house, a number of post-war works by Marc Chagall with a paper background have found their way to the collection of the state institution. The ongoing temporary exhibition is a great opportunity for visitors to get acquainted with the artist's diverse techniques and means of expression. The exhibition features all of the Marc Chagall’s objects in which the Museum has invested.