The Arts Society Ashdown Forest: Marc Chagall, a talk by Monica Bohm-Duchen

Marc Chagall was an early modernist painter who also worked with a wide range of artistic formats, including stained glass – for example, locally, he designed all the windows in the All Saints Church, Tudely, Kent. As his work makes abundantly clear, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) remained deeply loyal to his humble Russian-Jewish origins. Yet he also wished his art to have universal appeal – which, judging by its popularity, it undoubtedly achieved.
This lecture traces his long, chequered and colourful career, giving particular emphasis to the creative tensions produced by the very different cultural and artistic environments in which he found himself: starting with his home town of Vitbsk (up to 1906), then St Petersburg (1906-10), Paris (1910-14), Revolutionary Russia (1914-22), Paris again (1923-40), America during the War, and back to France in 1948.
Monica Bohm-Duchen is a freelance lecturer, writer, exhibition organiser and tour leader. She has lectured for Tate, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy of Arts, the Open University, Sotheby’s Institute of Arts and the Courtauld Institute of Arts and is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck College. Amongst her publications are ‘Understanding Modern Art’, ‘Chagall’ and ‘Art and the Second World War’.