February 27, 2009

Books

Painter of a Lost World

ChagallA BiographyJackie WullschlagerAlfred A. Knopf, $40, 582 pp.

Susannah Rutherglen

“If I were not a Jew...I wouldn’t have been an artist, or I would be a different artist altogether,” Russian-born painter Marc Chagall once declared. It was a paradoxical statement, because Judaism, with its prohibitions against image worship, has no sustained tradition of figurative art. Chagall recalled that, growing up in the isolated Russian town of Vitebsk during the (...)


 

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