1919, Marc Chagall, Oh God -- Philadelphia Museum of Art
From the museum label: Chagall embraced the 1917 Russian Revolution’s discourse of radical social transformation, seeing a parallel need in a revolutionary society for dynamic and forward-looking forms of art. In early 1919, having recently taken up an appointment as the local Commissar of Fine Art, he organized an art school in his hometown of Vitebsk. Chagall secured leading modern artists as teachers, including El Lissitzky, whose Proun 2 is on view in gallery 280. However, he left the city in June 1920, after clashing with these colleagues over the direction the school should take. In this painting, the rotation of the figure’s head perhaps registers Chagall’s pain and disappointment at being forced out of his school. In the background, Oh God written in Cyrillic script rises over Vitebsk.
1919, Marc Chagall, Oh God -- Philadelphia Museum of Art
From the museum label: Chagall embraced the 1917 Russian Revolution’s discourse of radical social transformation, seeing a parallel need in a revolutionary society for dynamic and forward-looking forms of art. In early 1919, having recently taken up an appointment as the local Commissar of Fine Art, he organized an art school in his hometown of Vitebsk. Chagall secured leading modern artists as teachers, including El Lissitzky, whose Proun 2 is on view in gallery 280. However, he left the city in June 1920, after clashing with these colleagues over the direction the school should take. In this painting, the rotation of the figure’s head perhaps registers Chagall’s pain and disappointment at being forced out of his school. In the background, Oh God written in Cyrillic script rises over Vitebsk.