Marc Chagall Exhibition

Opera Gallery

This event has ended.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artists’ palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Marc Chagall

Opera Gallery New York presents a solo exhibition of important artworks by Marc Chagall, exhibited together for the first time in our flagship gallery on Madison Avenue.

Marc Chagall is one of the most celebrated and important art figures of 20th century art, with works held and cherished by most significant museums and art collections worldwide and major commissions during his lifetime including the ceiling of Opéra Garnier, Paris and two mighty frescoes at the NYC Met Opera. His artworks comprise many mediums, however Chagall worked predominantly with paint capturing, with vivid, passionate color and energy, the internal and the external human experience.

Chagall was born in Vitebsk in Belarus in 1887. His Jewish heritage remained a major influence on his life as an artist through his attempts to reference and maintain the traditions in which he had grown up but which were fast disappearing or under perennial threat. This remained at the root of his practice throughout his life, later stating: “I am a little Jew of Vitebsk. All that I paint, and all that I do, all that I am, is just the little Jew of Vitebsk”. Despite this very particular and idiosyncratic lens Chagall saw his work as “not the dream of one people but of all humanity”.

Chagall’s dreamlike figurative depictions are associated with several major artistic movements of the 20th century including Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism. In his early twenties Chagall relocated to Paris to further develop his artistic vision, arriving from Russia with an unapologetic sentimentality which he maintained.

He continued to paint the subjects from his memories alongside the Parisian scenes which now surrounded him, continually drawing renewed inspiration from his adoration for his beloved wife Bella. He developed a whole repertoire of motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky, the fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, livestock and transparent wombs with tiny offspring sleeping upside down, and in a sense they remained dreams of home with the nostalgic undertone of yearning and loss.

During WWII Chagall relocated to New York City, joining a plethora of writers, painters and composers who like himself had fled the Nazi occupation across Europe, no doubt adding to the artistic and cultural melting pot of what New York City has become today. Despite obvious artistic relationships, Chagall did not want his work to be too closely associated with any specific school or movement, considering his own singular vision, personal language and folk symbolism of greater purpose and importance to himself.

From such humble beginnings, Chagall went on to experience enormous success during his lifetime and beyond, receiving major honors and accolades and leaving an enormous and profound creative legacy. Opera Gallery New York looks forward, with huge anticipation, to sharing these revered works, part of the heritage of this cherished artist, with our esteemed guests.