Artistically Inclined

This semester at Uni, I took an Art History unit that was to do with all things Russian. When I was at school, I did a very basic History class that covered the Russian Revolution, and when I was a kid, I think I just about wore through my video copy of Anastasia (you remember, the cartoon with the voices of Meg Ryan and John Cusak?). So I figured that I had enough of an interest to stimulate me through an entire unit.

Little did I know, that I would find someone who would become one of my favourite artists, Marc Chagall.

Never really a massive fan of symbolist works, and generally disdainful of anything that could broadly be described as Post-Impressionist, I was surprised at how much I really, really appreciate his works. Probably because they're all introspective reflections of where he was emotionally and mentally at the time, there's a gentle beauty and something universal about his paintings. They all feel like memories (and a lot of them feature Vitebsk, the town in Belarus where he grew up) or just plain feelings. I don't think I'd ever picked up on the emotive level of painting as acutely as I did when I was studying the work of Chagall. And I've only seen reproductions on Google!

I'm now pretty keen to go to Russia (and MoMA, and Paris) to see his works in the flesh, so to speak. I'm a little bit in love.

(The images I've included here are his Promenade from 1917-18, which is in the State Russian Museum in Moscow, and Red Nude Sitting Up (1908) which is in a private collection).