Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson

Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson

Part of the Jewish Encounter series

Novelist and critic Jonathan Wilson clears away the sentimental mists surrounding an artist whose career spanned two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Holocaust, and the birth of the State of Israel. Marc Chagall's work addresses these transforming events, but his ambivalence about his role as a Jewish artist adds an intriguing wrinkle to common assumptions about his life. Drawn to sacred subject matter, Chagall remains defiantly secular in outlook; determined to narrate the miraculous and tragic events of the Jewish past, he frequently chooses Jesus as a symbol of martyrdom and sacrifice.

Wilson brilliantly demonstrates how Marc Chagall's life constitutes a grand canvas on which much of twentieth-century Jewish history is vividly portrayed. Chagall left Belorussia for Paris in 1910, at the dawn of modernism, looking back dreamily on the world he abandoned. After his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld in 1915, he moved to Petrograd, but eventually returned to Paris after a stint as a Soviet commissar for art. Fleeing Paris steps ahead of the Nazis, Chagall arrived in New York in 1941. Drawn to Israel, but not enough to live there, Chagall grappled endlessly with both a nostalgic attachment to a vanished past and the magnetic pull of an uninhibited secular present.

Wilson's portrait of Chagall is altogether more historical, more political, and edgier than conventional wisdom would have us believe-showing us how Chagall is the emblematic Jewish artist of the twentieth century.

Visit nextbook.org/chagall for a virtual museum of Chagall images.

Jonathan Wilson was born in London in 1950 and went to Essex, Oxford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for his education. Since 1976, he has lived in the United States, with a four-year stint in Jerusalem. He has already published two works of fiction, The Hidden Room and Schoom. His stories, articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Best American Short Stories. In 1994, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction. He is the chair of Tufts University's English Department and resides in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780805242010
ISBN 10	0805242015
Title	Marc Chagall
Author	Jonathan Wilson
Series	Jewish Encounters Series
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Schocken Books
Year published	2007-03-13
Number of pages	256
Prizes	Commended for National Jewish Book Award (Biography/Autobiography) 2007
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.