Final Years and Death
Author Serena Davies writes that "By the time he died in France in 1985—the last surviving master of European modernism, outliving Joan Miró by two years—he had experienced at first hand the high hopes and crushing disappointments of the Russian revolution, and had witnessed the end of the Pale, the near annihilation of European Jewry, and the obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a population of 240,000 survived the Second World War."
Marc Chagall's last painting was a commissioned piece of art for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The maquette painting titled “Job” was completed for the commission however he died during the final days of the Job tapestry fabrication. His last piece of art was for all disabled people of the world.
His relationship with his Jewish identity was "unresolved and tragic", Davies states. He would have died without Jewish rites, had not a Jewish stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over his coffin.
Read more about this topic: Marc Chagall
Famous quotes containing the words final, years and/or death:
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“For in the word death
There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;
Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to, skill
In surviving, for death it cannot survive,
Only resign the irrecoverable keys.
The wave falters and drowns. The coulter of joy
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Depends. And there are thrown up waves.”
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