Moscow exhibition probes Chagall's Jewish Russian roots.

Moscow exhibition probes Chagall's Jewish Russian roots.(Mysinchew).By Marina Lapenkova.MOSCOW, July 31, 2012 (AFP) - Once banned as "bourgeois", the work of painter Marc Chagall is enjoying a revival in the ex-Soviet Union with a new exhibition delving into the influence folk art and his Russian Jewish roots had on his work. "Visitors often ask, why Chagall's animals are blue, yellow or pink, why the bride is flying over the rooftops and the man has two faces. They will now understand where Chagall drew (his images) from," said curator Ekaterina Selezneva.
To emphasise the importance of these influences, the exhibition at Moscow's Tretyakov Gallery features a popular Russian engraving on wood, a carpet and icon as well as a Jewish spice-cake mould and seven-branched menorah chandelier.
Born Moishe Segal in 1887 to a poor Jewish family outside Vitebsk in modern Belarus, Chagall never forgot his life in the Jewish pale -- the area to which Catherine II confined the jews of her empire in the 18th century -- and recalls images of Vitebsk in each painting. When the 1917 Russian Revolution abolished anti-Semitic laws, Chagall was appointed Fine Arts Commissioner in Vitebsk, but a conflict with the fellow painter and colleague Kazimir Malevich led to his resignation in 1920. Chagall left Vitebsk and within two years emigrated to France. The exhibition, which runs until September 30, "must help people to understand the mystery of Chagall" who always looked to popular art in his search for a distinctive figurative language, said Selezneva. Also on display are little-known drawings, watercolours and gouaches by Chagall as well as sketches of Vitebsk, Paris collages and famous illustrations of the Bible and Lafontaine's fables.Read the full story here.