Marc Chagall Quotes - Page 3

My mother's love for me was so great I have worked hard to justify it.

But perhaps my art is the art of a lunatic, I thought, mere glittering quicksilver, a blue soul breaking in upon my pictures.

I am out to introduce a psychic shock into my painting, one that is always motivated by pictorial reasoning: that is to say, a fourth dimension.

One fine day as my mother was putting the bread in the oven, I went up to her and taking her by her flour-smeared elbow I said to her, Mama I want to be a painter.

In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others.

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it

I am a child who is getting on.

What counts is art. painting, a kind of painting that is quite different from what everyone makes it out to be. But what kind? Will God or someone else give me the strength to breathe the breath of prayer and mourning into my paintings, the breath of prayer for redemption and resurrection?

Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me.

For me, Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr.

My works are dear to me, each in its own way, I shall have to answer for them on the Day off Judgement. God alone knows whether I shall ever see them again. Quite apart from the money which I was going to receive for their sale there (exhibition in Gallery Der Sturm, Berlin June-July, 1914) and it is no small sum.

One must always be careful not to let one's work be covered with moss.

The most authentic Russian Impressionism leaves one perplexed if one compares it with Monet and Pissarro. Here, in the Louvre, before the canvases of Manet, Millet and others, I understood why my alliance with Russia and Russian art did not take root.

No academy could have given me all I discovered by getting my teeth into the exhibitions, the shop windows, and the museums of Paris . Beginning with the market - where, for lack of money, I bought only a piece of a long cucumber - the workman in his blue overall, the most ardent followers of Cubism , everything showed a definite feeling for proportion, clarity, an accurate sense of form, of a more painterly kind of painting, even in the canvases of second-rate artists.

But my knowledge of Marxism was limited to knowing that Marx was a Jew, and that he had a long white beard. I said to Lunatcharsky (the political communist commissar for Education, 1918, fh) 'Whatever you do, don't ask me why I painted in blue or green, and why you can see a calf inside the cow's belly, etc. On the other hand you're welcome: if Marx is so wise, let him come back to life and explain it himself'. I showed him my canvases.