The Musician (Le Musicien)

ca. 1912-1914

The Musician evokes the spiritual significance of music for Marc Chagall and his memories of growing up in a Russian Jewish household in Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, listening to his uncle play the fiddle. He painted the work in Paris, where he had arrived in 1910 and quickly been catalyzed by the avant-garde pictorial vocabulary of vibrant color and flattened space.

Chagall—along with Chana Orloff, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine, whose works can be seen nearby—was one of many Jewish Eastern European artists drawn to Paris in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Although many found acceptance and success, by the 1920s their status as “outsiders” and pervasive anti-Semitism and xenophobia led a number of critics to apply the term School of Paris to these artists to distinguish them from the French-born Christian painters of the School of France.