“Movsha studied Hebrew, Torah and Talmud as a child” – Kommersant FM

Kommersant FM columnist Dmitry Butkevich talks about the artist’s family, as well as what works are presented at the exhibition of the author’s works in Paris.

The Center Pompidou in Paris, entitled “Chagall at Work,” presents works donated to the museum as recently as 2022 by the artist’s granddaughters Bella and Meret Meyer. The show includes 127 drawings, 5 ceramics and 7 sculptures.

I like most of all how Movsha Khatskelevich Chagall is presented in the world press (by the way, according to documents, his grandfather was sometimes called Sagal), who was born in 1887 in the town of Liozno not far from Vitebsk, in the Pale of Settlement of the deep Russian Empire. By the way, it will exist for another 30 years, a third of a century. Movsha was the eldest child in the family of clerk Khatskel Mordukhovich Chagall and Feiga-Ita Mendelevna Chernina. The parents, who married in 1886 when Feige-Ita was 15 years old, were each other’s first cousins.

So, foreign sources call Chagall a “Franco-Belarusian painter”. This seems very strange to me. Movsha studied Hebrew, Torah and Talmud as a child. Of course, as the son of a local clerk, he knew Yiddish, and Russian, again, as the son of a clerk. He probably replaced dad in the shop, and he studied for several years in St. Petersburg, and then became a commissar in 1918. There is no indication that Mark Zakharovich knows the Belarusian language. I’ll tell you more, in my childhood in Moscow there was a popular legend that Marc Chagall, who, by the way, died in 1985, I might have known him, supposedly until the end of his life spoke only two languages ​​- Yiddish and Russian A lie for sure, but beautiful.

The exhibition at the Pompidou shows preparatory studies for stage costumes and curtains for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet The Firebird, staged by the New York Ballet Theater in 1945. Also included are sketches of the ceiling design of the Opera Garnier in Paris, created in 1962, and a collection of ceramics, collages and sculptures from the 1950s.

And when I remember how, while wandering around Zurich, I accidentally – that’s the truth – crossed the Limmat River and ran into the Fraumünster Church… And suddenly – a complete shock – huge stained glass windows of Chagall! Its blue-green.