Museo Ebraico di Bologna
Lecturer: Franco Bonilauri, former director of the Museo Ebraico di Bologna
17 - 18.30
Monday 12, 19 and 26 February 2018
Marc Chagall (6 Jul 1887 - 28 Mar 1985), was born into a family of Hasidic Jews in Vitebsk, Belarus, in one of the many shtetls of Yiddishland, where a total of around 9 million Jews lived.
He received a very religious upbringing, which he would have to come to terms with from boyhood, when he began to develop his drawing skills against the wishes of his family, who wanted him to be a shop clerk. But Chagall could not resist and began painting his relatives and the life unfolding before him, at home and in the street. Here lies the core of Chagall's poetics, essentially tied to an intimate, popular vision of both Jewish origin and Russian tradition that would influence him throughout his life.
In the first lecture, themes related to Jewish and Russian life and traditions will be explored, which found their greatest popular splendour in certain festivities. Many narrative models, although leaning towards Judaism, are of Russian inspiration, and these would increasingly compose the complex fabric of his poetics, characterised by a phantasmagoria of figures full of rhythm and vivid colours, but above all of imagination. He would be compared with the artistic avant-gardes of his time in Germany and Paris and with already established contemporary authors such as Picasso and Matisse, as well as his Russian friends such as the Delaunays and Malevich.
In the second lecture, issues related to cultural and civil commitment towards the Russian Revolution and the Jewish Theatre of Moscow will be highlighted, up to his return to Paris and the resumption of Western fairytale narration in graphic art, before arriving, in the third meeting, at the post-war period, which would see him engaged in the creation of major works in France, Israel and New York.
Chagall is a giant of the 900s who was able to express a peculiar vision of human sensitivity; his works allow us to navigate with joy, cheerfulness and serenity within the intimate and playful human world.