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Marc Chagall »

Book cover image of Marc Chagall by Jonathan Wilson

Authors: Jonathan Wilson
ISBN-13: 9780805242010, ISBN-10: 0805242015
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: March 2007
Edition: (Non-applicable)

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Author Biography: Jonathan Wilson

With A Palestine Affair -- a combination thriller/literary romance -- Jonathan Wilson sweeps readers up into the chaos of 1920s Palestine. "Like the best of historical fiction, Wilson's story is placed in an imagined past, but it is really happening right now," says The Washington Post of Wilson's breakout novel.

Book Synopsis

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.

The New York Times - Tara McKelvey

Critics say Chagall (1887-1985) is near kitsch, and in his lovely, wise book, Wilson often agrees…Nevertheless, Wilson…depicts Chagall as a luftmensch—not in the word's metaphorical sense ("an individual overly involved in intellectual pursuits") but in its literal one: "man of the air." His paintings of adoring couples, "valentines" to his wife, Bella, levitate above "Fiddler" ooze, Jesus portraits and personal shortcomings and are rightly "adored by crowds of young lovers and those yearning for love, who have taken to them as lasting images of romantic persistence in the face of a world gone mad."

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