My Life was written in Moscow in 1921-1922, when Chagall was thirty-five years old. Although long out-of-print, it remains one of the most extraordinarily inventive and beautifully told of all autobiographies. The text is accompanied by twenty plates which Chagall prepared especially to illustrate his life story. Together, the words and pictures paint an incomparable portrait of one of the greatest painters of this century, and of the now vanished milieu which inspired him.

"I painted my world, my life, all the things I loved, all the things I dreamed of, all the things I could not say in words. I painted my beloved Russia, my hometown Vitebsk, the Jewish neighborhood where I grew up, the way I saw everything as a child."During prayers he would daydream; in school he was distracted; and at home he worried about what profession he should choose. But when the young Marc Chagall realized he had artistic talent, he translated his unusual way of looking at the world into color and shape.Chagall grew up, became a painter, and traveled the world, but he never forgot...

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in...

This charming memoir by Bella Chagall recalls her childhood in Vitebsk, the Russian-Jewish market town where she and her husband, Marc Chagall, grew up. Her warm reminiscences of Jewish family life in pre-Revolutionary Russia are illustrated with thirty-six pen-and-ink drawings by Marc Chagall.
Bella Chagall, a gifted author and actress, was the youngest of seven children born to a well-to-do Hasidic family. While living in France in the 1930s, the Chagalls conceived the idea of commemorating their native town with a book. The title they chose was Burning Lights, an allusion to...

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) traversed a long route from a boy in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, to a commissar of art in revolutionary Russia, to the position of a world-famous French artist. This book presents for the first time a comprehensive collection of Chagall's public statements on art and culture. The documents and interviews shed light on his rich, versatile, and enigmatic art from within his own mental world. The book raises the problems of a multi-cultural artist with several intersecting identities and the tensions between modernist form and cultural representation in...

Marc Chagall (1887-1985) ist im Viertel der armen Juden in Witebsk in Rußland aufgewachsen. 1941 kehrte er nach Aufenthalten in St. Petersburg, Paris und Berlin vorübergehend an den Ort seiner Kindheit und frühen Jugend zurück. Aus der freudigen Stimmung dieser Wiederbegegnung mit seiner Heimatstadt heraus entstand Anfang der 20er Jahre ein Radierzyklus mit Alltagsszenen und den Bezugspersonen seiner Kindheit. Liebevoll dargestellt sind die Eltern und die Großeltern, Chagalls Geburt, das Geburtshaus, der erste Kuß, die Hochzeit, Straßenszenen oder die wehmutsvolle Begegnung mit den...