Chagall, Paris – New York

Paris and New York, the emblematic capitals of modern art, represent two crucial stages in the artist’s long career. Paris was his chosen city, and thanks to the avant-garde movements of the 1910s, it provided the young Russian painter with a pool of experimental work, which he enriched with his own cultural references. New York was primarily a place of exile during the 1940s, and yet it gave the artist’s creativity fresh impetus. After the war, several exhibitions and major commissions reinforced the links between Paris and New York and brought Chagall back to the United States, up until the 1970s.

While developing his own stylistic approach and not being tied to any of the schools or movements he frequented and observed, Chagall enriched his work with the most diverse and contemporary experiences in each of the cities and continents where he lived. Hence, while in Paris he came into contact with the Cubist and Fauve movements, experimented with a new form of light and developed his rich and intense palette. In Vitebsk, he joined the russian avant-garde organizations, campaigning in particular for the renewal of stage art and urban decoration. But it was in New York that the experience of the space and architecture of the New World had a greater impact on this revolutionary exploration. Applied well beyond the field of painting, it embraced the theatre and ballet costumes, sculpture, ceramics, stained-glass windows, mosaics, and collage… as part of a multidisciplinary and resolutely monumental quest, which will be experienced by the visitors too as they are submerged in this digital work.