“I am working in Paris. I cannot for a single day get the thought out of my head that there probably exists something essential, some immutable reality, and now that I have lost everything else (thank God, it gets lost all on its own) I am trying to preserve this and, what is more, not to be content. In a word: I am working.”
“When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the...”
Marc Chagall
“Great art picks up where nature ends.”
Marc Chagall
“For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr. That is how I understood him in 1908 when I used this figure for the first time.. .It was under the influence of the pogroms. T...”
Marc Chagall
“If Russian painters were condemned to become the pupils of the West they were, I think, rather unfaithful ones by their very nature. The best Russian realist conflicts with the realism of Courbet. The...”
Marc Chagall
“In response I am sending you some pictures which I painted in Paris out of homesickness for Russia. They are not very typical of me; I have selected the most modest ones for the Russian exhibition.”
Marc Chagall