Chagall: Love and Exile - Softcover

Wullschlager, Jackie

4.04

166 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141009888 ISBN 13: 9780141009889

Publisher: Penguin, 2010

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'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.'

Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival.

Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive "potato-coloured" czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where "you either died or came out famous". Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Drawing on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.

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Review:

Jackie Wullschlager's wonderful biography moves with sure speed and precise drama (A.S. Byatt Financial Times)

This is a masterly biography. Jackie Wullschlager has a painter's eye, a historian's grasp of context and a novelist's pace and momentum. She gives back to Chagall's paintings the sharpness and strangeness that they had for his contemporaries ... so gripping that I couldn't put the book down (Hilary Spurling)

From the Publisher:

Winner of the European Craft Prize for 2008

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