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:
“Dignity: the doomed man’s final refuge.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Eyes spiritualised by death can judge,
I cannot, but I am not content.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)