Marc Chagall - Art Quotes

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When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Marc Chagall
Or is all this fuss actually important for << art history >>? Oh, no, never. If things only ever originated as a result of such competition (between subject- and subjectless art), it wouldn't be worth living among them, like an accidental, capricious toy. Clearly there is a greater, a more serene and more modest power, but we are either too lazy to live by its laws, or we have no time, or it "hurts too much".

Marc Chagall
In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

Marc Chagall
Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back.... It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia (where Chagall was born) took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort.... It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West.

Marc Chagall
Now at least "artists have the upper hand" in the town (Vitebsk). They get totally engrossed in their disputes about art (between constructivists and suprematists), I am utterly exhausted and 'dream' of 'abroad'.... After all, there is no more suitable place for artists to be (for me, at least) than at the easel, and I dream of being able to devote myself exclusively to my pictures. Of course, little by little one paints something, but it's not the real thing.

Marc Chagall
At present there is an extremely exaggerated formation of groups; there are 1. young people following Malevich and 2. young people following me. We both belong to the left-wing artistic movement, although we have different ideas about ends and means. Obviously it would take too long to talk about this problem now.... But there is one thing I will tell you: Although I was born in Russia - and what is more: in the "settlement territory" – I was trained abroad and am all the more sensitive to everything that is taking place here in the field of art (the fine arts). The memory of the splendor of the original is too much painful for me...

Marc Chagall
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Marc Chagall
Back in the days (a later reflection on his early Parish years) when I was in Paris in my studio in 'La Ruche', through the partition I heard two Jewish emigrants arguing: 'Well, what would you say? Wasn't Antokolsky a Jewish artist? And Israels? And what about Liebermann?' The dim light of the lamp lit up my picture, which was upside down (that's the way I work – so consider yourself yourselves lucky!). As morning came, and the Parisian sky started to brighten up, I had to laugh about the futile comments of my neighbours on the fate of Jewish art: 'You two wind-backs can carry on – but I've got work to do'.

Marc Chagall
The soil that had nourished the roots of my art was Vitebsk [his home town in Russia]; but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water.

Marc Chagall
Art seems to me to be above all a state of soul. All souls are sacred, the soul of all the bipeds in every quarter of the globe.

Marc Chagall
Everything in art must spring from the movement of our whole life-stream, of our whole being - including the unconscious.

Marc Chagall