1. Chagall, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photograph of Achim Kukulies
Modernism, memory and marginality in the early works of Marc Chagall
The image of Marc Chagall (1887–1985) as a painter of lovers, flying fiddlers, and colorful dreams has long overshadowed the historically anchored dimensions of his work. The Chagall exhibition at K20 disrupts this reading by shifting the emphasis to the artist’s early years, with a focus on the works created between 1910 and 1923. These years, spanning his initial migration to Paris, a forced return to Vitebsk due to the First World War, and his uneasy involvement in the Russian Revolution.
This exhibition argues that Chagall’s poetic imagination was not a retreat from history but a profound response to it. It invites reconsideration of Chagall not only as a modernist but also as an engaged artist whose works bear witness to Jewish life in Eastern Europe, exile, and political violence.
Between modernism and marginality
2. Chagall, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photograph of Achim Kukulies
The central curatorial thinking of the show lies in the tension between the painter’s vocabulary and it’s historical subject. As the exhibition notes, the works from this period, such as “Sabbath” (1911), To “Russia, Asses and Others” (1911), and “Golgotha” (1912) “contain sharp criticism of the social conditions of his time.” In other words, these are not merely fantastical tableaux but interventions into questions of identity, marginalization, and trauma.
How does one reconcile Chagall’s luminous palette and supernatural imagery with the violent realities of murder accusations, and revolutionary repression? And in what ways do Chagall’s Jewish and Eastern European roots both isolate and enrich his position within the Western avant-garde?
These questions invite us to read Chagall’s iconography not as an escape into myth, but as a strategic modulation of modernist forms, Cubism, Fauvism, Suprematism, toward an aesthetics of displacement and survival.
3. Chagall, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photograph of Achim Kukulies
Arriving in Paris in 1911, Chagall found himself at the vibrant crossroads of the European avant-garde. Despite linguistic and financial barriers, he quickly integrated into literary and artistic circles: Apollinaire, Cendrars, the Delaunays, where he absorbed the techniques of Cubism and Fauvism. Yet unlike his peers, Chagall’s work remained figurative, insistent on narrativity, memory, and symbolism.
His early synthesis of Cubist geometry with motifs from Jewish folklore and Russian village life formed a visual vocabulary that’s simultaneously modern. The “Violinist” (1911–14), for example, exemplifies this duality: the fragmented planes evoke Cubist abstraction, while the subject, a fiddler hovering above a shtetl roof, channels diasporic nostalgia and ritual life. Chagall’s art thus functions as a site of cultural hybridization, inscribing marginal identities into modernist form.
Vitebsk and the war, the artist in exile
When Marc Chagall returned to his hometown of Vitebsk in the summer of 1914, ostensibly for a brief visit following his Berlin solo show, he found immobilized by the outbreak of World War I. Cut off from the Parisian avant-garde, he was thrust into a environment marked by material scarcity, familial obligations, and an ambivalent relationship to his Jewish roots.
In Vitebsk, Chagall returned to familiar subjects: domestic life, the rituals of his Jewish community, the architecture of his youth. The death of his mother in 1915 and his marriage to Bella Rosenfeld further grounded his universe in intimacy and memory. The constraints of wartime conditions, such as limited access to canvas, led him to work primarily on paper and cardboard, mediums that demanded immediacy and adaptability.
Crucially, this was not a period of aesthetic retreat, but of synthesis. Chagall adapted the formal lessons of Paris, its vibrant palette, its expressive distortion, to the needs of an autobiographical iconography. The result was a singular form of figurative modernism that bore witness to his personal and cultural history while subtly resisting the dominant pictorial conventions of the Russian art scene.
Revolutionary disillusionment
The twin revolutions of 1917, the fall of tsarist autocracy and the granting of civil rights to Jewish citizens seemed to promise a new social and artistic order. Positioned briefly at the heart of this transformation, Chagall was appointed Fine Arts Commissioner for the Vitebsk region and tasked with democratizing culture through education and exhibitions. He founded the People’s Art School and invited prominent avant-garde figures: El Lissitzky, Vera Ermolaeva, Ivan Puni, and most notably Kazimir Malevich, to join the faculty.
Chagall’s emphasis on individual expression and symbolic narrative clashed with Malevich’s absolutist vision of Suprematism, which promoted geometric abstraction as the visual language of revolutionary purity. For Chagall, such non-objective art, while intellectually provocative, was too detached from lived experience.
Nonetheless, Chagall’s brief experimentation with abstraction during this period remains revealing. A number of works on paper from these years, rarely exhibited, demonstrate his engagement with Suprematist structures, flattened space, modular forms, planar composition only to ultimately reject their logic. His return to a hybrid vocabulary of floating figures, color, and folkloric motifs underscores his belief in the spiritual and narrative capacities of painting.
Return to the West
By 1922, the tensions of post-revolutionary Russia had become untenable for Chagall, both personally and artistically. Granted permission to emigrate, he resettled in Berlin before returning to Paris the following year. There, he was confronted with his past life: his studio had been destroyed, and much of his pre-war work was lost or sold without his knowledge. In response, Chagall embarked on an ambitious project of pictorial reconstruction.
Rather than attempting to replicate lost works verbatim, he created new iterations, variations on vanished themes that now bore the patina of memory and exile. This period is marked by a shift in tone and technique. The figures that had once leapt boldly from his canvases now hovered in luminous suspension, between worlds.
This return to France did not signal a rupture with his Russian past but a reframing of it. Motifs from Vitebsk continued to haunt his compositions, now interwoven with Parisian imagery and light. Thematically, his work negotiated the dialectic of loss and renewal, of being twice exiled, first from the shtetl, then from revolution. In this sense, Chagall’s post-1923 paintings are less about stylistic evolution than about reconstructing continuity amid fragmentation.
Exile in New York
4. Chagall, Exhibition view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2025, Photograph of Achim Kukulies

The onset of World War II once again forced Chagall into exile, this time across the Atlantic. Facilitated by the Emergency Rescue Committee and an invitation from the Museum of Modern Art, Chagall and his family arrived in New York in 1941. The trauma of displacement, coupled with the sudden death of Bella in 1944, plunged him into emotional and creative crisis. Yet out of this darkness emerged a renewed commitment to painting.
One of the most striking developments of this period was his focus on color as an expressive force. Inspired by the stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals, Chagall began to structure his compositions around large monochromatic fields, deep blues, fiery reds, luminous greens, that imbued his imagery with symbolic and emotional density. These chromatic zones operated not as background but as affective space, enveloping his floating figures in halos of memory and desire.
Late motifs
In his final decades, Chagall’s pictorial universe expanded to embrace both the tragic and the dimensions of human experience. Certain motifs became increasingly central, floating bouquets, circus performers, and religious iconography; each charged with significance.
Bouquets, often rendered in exuberant color, served not merely as decorative flourishes but as symbols of love, fertility, and transience. Their presence in otherwise grounded scenes suggested the possibility of transcendence, even amid loss. Similarly, the circus functioned for Chagall as a metaphor for the artist's condition, at once celebrated and precarious, public yet vulnerable. The clowns, dancers, and hybrid creatures that populate these compositions are not just performers, but avatars of otherness, echoing Chagall’s own outsider status.
The Chagall exhibition repositions the artist within the landscape of modernism as a politically conscious figure whose visual language was shaped by exile, revolution, and cultural hybridity. Far from offering reveries, his works from 1910 to 1923 reveal a painter grappling with the violence of history through a blend of symbolism, memory, and innovation.
Rather than submitting to dominant narratives, whether avant-garde abstraction, Chagall crafted a pictorial vocabulary that was personal, diasporic, and resistant. His motifs float, not because they evade reality, but because they bear its full emotional weight. His early works are not naive fables but charged visual meditations on love, loss, and the fragility of belonging.
Informations about the exhibition
Place: K 20
Date: 15.3.2025 – 10.8.2025
Curators: Susanne Meyer-BĂĽser
Ticket: Available at the front desk of the museum
Informations about the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
K20
Grabbeplatz 5
40 213 DĂĽsseldorf
Phone: +49 211 83 81 204
Mail: service@kunstsammlung.de