An Art School Started by Marc Chagall that Became a Modernist Wasteland
The Centre Pompidou examines the thrilling but lesser-known story of the People’s Art School, founded in 1918 by the painter Marc Chagall in his hometown of Vitebsk.
PARIS — A large, wall-sized photograph of Lenin addressing a crowd of Red Army soldiers greets visitors to Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-garde in Vitebsk, 1918–1922 at the Pompidou Center. Context is important to this show, which examines the thrilling but lesser known story of the People’s Art School, founded in 1918 by the painter Marc Chagall in his hometown of Vitebsk, a small city to the north of present-day Belarus.
Chagall had witnessed first hand the outbreak of the Bolshevik Revolution from the window of his apartment in Petrograd during what was supposed to have been a brief return to his home country. The trip was initially conceived to be just long enough to collect some possessions and bring his new wife, Bella Rosenfeld, back with him to Paris, where he had been working since 1910. The eruption of World War I kept the newlyweds in Russia, but it was the immediate aftermath of the Revolution that convinced them to stay. New Soviet laws outlawing religious discrimination granted Chagall, born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal to a Hasidic Jewish family, full rights and citizenship for the first time in his life.
