Question by Gorden: did marc chagall influence any female artist?
many male artist influenced female artist, diego rivera influenced Frieda Kahlo and Duchamp influenced Baroness Elsa …Did Marc Chagall influence any women artist?
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Answer by Rowena
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues
Number 14, Fall 5768/2007
E-ISSN: 1565-5288 Print ISSN: 0793-8934
DOI: 10.1353/nsh.2008.0008
Rajner, Mirjam.
Marc Chagall’s 1909 Portraits of Women
Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues – Number 14, Fall 5768/2007, pp. 131-159
Indiana University Press
In 1909, Chagall painted the first known portrait of his future wife, Bella (Berta) Rosenfeld. Known as My Fiancée in Black Gloves, this painting is usually viewed as his expression of admiration and love for Bella, who, apparently, was then only fourteen years old. When it is placed next to Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Brushes, from the same year, the two paintings, although not looking towards each other, seem to create a double portrait that recalls similar creations in the great art of the past.
Two additional portraits of women, also painted in 1909 and misleadingly known as portraits of the artist’s sisters, actually represent two other female friends of Chagall’s from that time, Thea Brachman and Bella Germont, both of them talented, university-educated young women. Juxtaposed with the portraits of Bella Rosenfeld and Chagall’s self-portrait, they tell much about the young artist’s differing attitudes towards each woman, their artistic and intellectual influence upon him, his ambivalences, and the questioning of his own role in these relationships. They also pay tribute to artists whose works interested Chagall at the time, such as Rembrandt, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse, and they show his appreciation for Russian Symbolism and the art of icons.
Several additional drawings and sketches that accompany the portraits of Bella Rosenfeld reveal further aspects of their relationship: Chagall’s feeling of inferiority towards the rich and educated Bella, who was not a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in 1909, but rather a twenty-year-old Moscow student of history, literature and philosophy. The new understanding of their relationship points towards his resentment and desire, her reserve and aloofness, and finally to why they do not look at each other in the final versions of their portraits.
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Ronnette says
Artistic career
Bella with White Collar, 1917
Chagall took inspiration from Belarusian folk-life, and portrayed many Biblical themes that reflected his Jewish heritage. In 1950 he began experimenting with graphic mediums. After meeting with Fernand Mourlot, he often visited Mourlot Studios where he eventually produced close to a thousand different lithographic editions. With the assistance of Charles Sorlier, a master printer working at Mourlot, he spent 30 years exploring the graphic medium that most lends itself to color representation. Charles Sorlier also became one of his closest friends, assistant and counsel until the day of his death.
Chagall's artworks are difficult to categorize. Working in the pre-World War I Paris art world, he was involved with avant-garde currents; however, his work was consistently on the fringes of popular art movements and emerging trends, including Cubism and Fauvism, among others. He was closely associated with the Paris School and its exponents, including Amedeo Modigliani.
Abounding with references to his childhood, Chagall's work has also been criticized for slighting some of the turmoil which he experienced. He communicates happiness and optimism to those who view his work strictly in terms of his use of highly vivid colors. Chagall often posed himself, sometimes together with his wife, as an observer of a colored world like that seen through a stained-glass window. Some see the painting, The White Crucifixion, which is rich with intriguing detail, as a denunciation of the Stalin regime, the Nazi Holocaust, and the oppression of Jews in general.
[edit]Theater sets and costumes
After the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Jewish theater became a catalyst for modernist experimentation. Chagall and other artists were hired to produce theater sets and costumes combining Russian folk art with elements of Cubo-Futurism and Constructivism.