Fiche artiste robert delaunay biography
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Green Violinist () : Marc Chagall's Avant-Garde Style: Paris
Green Violinist () : Marc Chagall's Avant-Garde Style: Paris
/ 6 minutes read
Marc Chagall’s Green Violinist is a striking composition that demonstrates his mastery of
color and is simultaneously avant garde in its composition and traditional in its subject matter,
a combination which characterized Chagall’s style. In this article, Singulart takes a closer look
at the artist’s life and style and at the composition of Green Violinist.
Who was Marc Chagall?
Marc Chagall in Paris, photographed by André Kertész
Marc Chagall () was a Russian-French artist and a renowned member of European
Early Modernism. He was born into a Lithuanian Jewish Hassidic family near the city of
Vitebsk, when Belarus was still part of the Russian Empire. At this time, Jewish children were
not allowed to attend regular schools and their freedom was heavily restricted. Thus Chagall
was educated at the local Jewish primary school until his mother bribed a regular high school
into accepting him. Despite the doubts of his family and the odds stacked against Jewish
artists at the time, Chagall pursued his desire to become a painter.
In , he moved to Saint Petersburg, obtaining a passport through a friend as was necessary
for Jews at the time, and he studied at a prestigious art school for tw
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Like Fernand Léger, Robert Delaunay, and several other artists, Raoul Dufy was commissioned to paint huge frescoes for the International Exposition in Paris. His commission was for the slightly curved wall of the entrance to the Pavillon de la Lumière et de l’Électricité (“Pavilion of Light and Electricity”), built by Robert Mallet-Stevens on the Champ de Mars. He abided by the instructions given to him by the electricity company, La Compagnie Parisienne de Distribution d’ Électricité, and told the story of La Fée Électricité (“The Electricity Fairy”), taking inspiration from, amongst other things, Lucretius’s De rerum natura. The composition unfolds across m2, from right to left, on two principal themes: the history of electricity and its applications – from the first observations to the most modern technical applications of it. The upper part is a changing landscape in which the painter has placed some of his favourite subjects: sailing boats, flocks of birds, a threshing machine, and a Bastille-day ball. Stretching the length of the lower half are portraits of one hundred and ten scientists and inventors who contributed to the development of electricity.
Dufy blends mythology and allegories with historical accuracy and technological description, setting up contrasts of