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:
“It is in the nature of allegory, as opposed to symbolism, to beg the question of absolute reality. The allegorist avails himself of a formal correspondence between “ideas” and “things,” both of which he assumes as given; he need not inquire whether either sphere is “real” or whether, in the final analysis, reality consists in their interaction.”
—Charles, Jr. Feidelson, U.S. educator, critic. Symbolism and American Literature, ch. 1, University of Chicago Press (1953)
“For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found that, by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Tear out the close vermiculate crease
Where death crawled angrily at bay.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)