Over Vitebsk(Marc Chagall)
Over Vitebsk belongs to a large series of works that the artist began after his return to his hometown in June 1914, which take as their subject an over-life-size, elderly beggar floating above the snow-laden rooftops of Vitebsk.
One interpretation of this composition is that the painting plays on the Yiddish expression for a beggar moving from door to door, er geyt iber di hayzer, which translates as “he walks over the houses.” This whimsical turn of phrase allowed Chagall to transform an otherwise naturalistically rendered scene of Vitebsk in winter through the addition of a strange airborne character with a sack on his back, whose presence imbues the composition with a dreamlike otherworldliness.
Over Vitebsk is a painting of Chagall’s hometown, and in some ways, it remains an identifiable landscape. Snow still blankets its winter streets, and onion domes – like those of the city’s famous Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary – are as distinctive elements in the skyline as the sandstone-yellow building that Chagall has depicted.
However, in one respect at least, it is unrecognisable to the community into which Chagall was born. None of its 50 synagogues have survived since the turn of the 20th century, and the formerly significant shtetl population of predominantly Ashkenazi Jews has left few traces that could survive the violence and state hostility of the past 100 years. However, “Over Vitebsk” has much to say about the position of Chagall’s community in his own day.
It has been easy for observers to mis-label the painting’s central figure. The archetype of the ‘Wandering Jew’ – represented for at least a millennium in Western European words and images – has been imprinted with definitions and associations by a predominantly non-Jewish culture. This, surely, is not the place to start. The identification with the ‘schnorrer’ or beggar from within Yiddish culture is also mistaken: this is a character-type defined by relations within a community, and by those who can joke at an all-to-well-known personality and attitude, at someone who belongs.
Rather, it is hard not to see the dark, bearded figure, his face turned away, as a representation of the exodus from Tsarist Russia – a displaced and dispossessed émigré among the several hundred thousand who had left and would continue to leave Eastern Europe in the days of Chagall’s childhood. An image suggesting such a migration has relevance at a time when stories of displacement and ethnic identity have such media currency. However, as the painting reminds us, such questions never cease to be current for those who identify – or are identified – with them.
Over Vitebsk represents stylistic traits that were key to Chagall’s life. He was influenced by the Cubist style of Braque and Picasso from his time in Paris – though this way of seeing could hardly eclipse Chagall’s strongly unique vision of the world. The tracks of traffic in the snow, the triangular and segmented lines in the white and grey foreground, immediately call to mind the stronger Cubist style of his still-lifes. And even in one of the more conventional paintings, the floating figure projected against the snow-clouds is characteristic of what the poet Apollinaire called “surnaturel”.
Yakov Kagan-Chabchay, Moscow, 22 November 1916,
Acquired directly from the artist;
Flechtheim Gallery, Berlin, circa 1928/29. Stock n. 1084 ‘Uber Russland’.
The Matthiesen Gallery, Berlin, 1931 – April 1932;
Dresdner Bank, 31 May 1934 to August 15 1935 (acquired as a forced sale).
Berlin Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 15 August 1935 September 18 1936. Acquired from Dresden Bank by the Prussian State and transferred to the Nationalgalerie;
Kurt Feldhausser (1905-1945), Berlin, 18 septembre 1936 to 1945. Acquired in an exchange from the Nationalgalerie;
Marie Louise Feldhausser (mother of the above), Berlin, 1945;
MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), New York, 1949, purchased from the above through the E. Weyhe Gallery, New York;
Restituted in 2021 to the heirs of, and successors in interest to, the shareholders of the Galerie Matthiesen GmbH of Berlin, Germany as such shareholders existed in 1934.
Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin : Propyläen Verlag, 1926, p. 502, ill. p. 160 ; 563
Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin : Propyläen Verlag, 1931, p. 503, ill. p. 644
Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall. Leben und Werk, Cologne : Ed
Dumont Schauberg, 1961, cat. n° 304;
Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Paris : Flammarion, 1964, cat. n° 304;
Exh. Cat., Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, and Florence, Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Marc Chagall, 1992-3, p. 10, illustrated;
Exh. Cat., Milan, Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, Marc Chagall, Il Teatro dei Sogni, 1994, p. 26, illustrated;
Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Marc Chagall, Jacques Thirion,
Chagall, New York : Hugh Lauter Levin associates, Inc., 1995, p. 109 ;
Gianni Pozzi, Chagall, Le peintre du rêve, Paris : Hatier, 1997, p. 30;
Ann H. Sievers, Linda Muehlig and Nancy Rich, Master Drawings from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, 2000, p. 216;
Marc Chagall and the lost jewish world. The nature of Chagall’s art
and iconography, New York : Ed. Rizzoli, 2006, cat. n° 74, p. 128
Chagall Magician of Colour, Seoul : Seoul Museum of Art, 2011, p. 55
Chagall Entre guerre et Paix, Paris : RMN, 2013, p. 58-59;
Chagall : Une vie entre guerre et paix, Paris : RMN, 2013, p. 13 ;
Yakov Kagan-Chabchay et sa galerie d’art juive, Moscou, 2015, cat.
n° 159, p. 180 ;
Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévitch, L’avant-garde russe à Vitebsk, 1918-1922, Paris : Centre Pompidou, 2018, p. 71;
Itzhak Goldberg, Chagall, Paris : Citadelles etamp;
Mazenod, 2019, cat. n° 123, p. 131.
Berlin, Galerie Lutz & Co., January 1923 (?)1
[Wiener Secession, Vienna, 11 September-
20 October 1924] (?)
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Recent Acquisitions, 1949-50 (no catalogue);
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 25th Anniversary Exhibition, 1954 (dated 1920 on the checklist; no catalogue);
New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Marc Chagall, 1957-58 (dated 1920 on the checklist; no catalogue)
New York, Gallery Chalette, March 1958 – April 1958, n.n., n.p., illustrated where dated 1914;
Caracas, Museo de Bellas Artes, De Cezanne a Miro, 1968 ;
New York, MoMA, From Cezanne to Miro, 1968;
Tel Aviv, Maitres Francais Du XXe Siecle, 1971;
Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, 16 June- 8 September 1991, Marc Chagall : Die Russischen Jahre 1906-1922, no.70,n.p., illustrated in colour Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, Chagall, entre guerre et paix, 2013, no.27, illustrated in colour ;
New York, MoMA, From Cezanne to Pollock;
New York, MoMA, 1996;
London, Royal Academy, Chagall: Love and the Stage, 1998, Merell Holberton Publishers London, 1998, cat. n° 13;
Berlin, Neue Nationalgalerie, Das MoMA in Berlin, 20 February- 19 September 2004;
Seoul, Museum of Art, Chagall Magician of Colour, 3 December 2010 – 27 March 2011;
Paris, Musée du Luxembourg, 21 February – 21 July 2013;
Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 28 March- 23 July 2018 ;
New York, Jewish Museum and Paris, Centre Pompidou, Chagall, Lissitzky, Malévich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922, 2018-19, n.n., p. 71, illustrated in colour.