Adversity, hard times — such has always been the
common backdrop or foundation to some of the greatest works of arts. Whether in the form of a painting, novel
or poem, creativity tends to abound in times of great distress.
Such was the case for a
generation of Russian artists during the early 1900s. With an influx of social change, revolution and war,
these artists desired to create a new type of art, one that embodied power, authenticity and a modern
aesthetic. One such artist of this group was Marc Chagall.
Until Jan.
15,
2012,
The AGO is presenting the exhibit,
Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde:
Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris. This extraordinary exhibit chronicles the
artistic life of Chagall and each of his contemporaries, as they travelled between Russia, France and
Germany, absorbing sources of shared inspiration along the way, before and during World War I and the Russian
Revolution.
For Chagall and this group
of artists, art served as a vessel or “engine” of radical and social change. Armed with “a dream of social
equality,” Chagall and the others saw art as a “political tool, meant for the street, the factory, the worker
and the masses,” as opposed to a mere “bourgeois luxury.”
Although influenced by an
array of muses — most noticeably the French rebel artists Henri Matisse and Paul Cezanne — the majority of
Chagall’s works were influenced by his preoccupation with the human form and his beloved home city, Vitebsk,
Russia (now Belarus). •
Photo Courtesy:
Vasily Kandinsky
Russian, 1866‐1944 Dans le gris, 1919 (In the Grey, 1919) oil on canvas 129.0 x 176.0 cm Collection of the
MNAM, Centre Pompidou, Paris© Adagp/Centre Pompidou, Mnam‐CCi / Dist.RMN
