Hickory Museum of Art - Chagall Presentation

Vivian Jacobson presented a discussion and slide show about Marc Chagall Sunday, March 15, 2009, in the Hickory Museum of Art. The presentation was attended by about sixty people and seemed well received. A short discussion followed and included comments about the contributions from the audience about some of the effects of Chagall's work including other well-known personalities such as Martin Buber, Author Koestler, Toscanini and even Elvis Presley.

Ms. Jacobson had known and worked with Mr. Chagall during the last 11 years of his life and she commented about him both as a personality as well as from personal knowledge. She also made insightful pointers about some of his paintings. I was struck by the composition of many of his paintings. Many, perhaps most of his subjects were positioned in the center of the frame, there seemed to be no verticality to the figures except in the final sense that they were somehow balanced and stable, he extensively had white areas touching the sides or top of the pictures and he used color in a remarkably contrasty manner. Green was largely absent from the work we saw today and when it was used it was richly saturated, heavy in value and sparingly used, or else it totally dominated the picture. Blues were his main color, lushly tinted and shaded, and a reddish-brownish-orangish-ochreish color shared that rule of his pictures with the blues, although the blues seemed not so richly melded with other hues.

Another "bravissimo!" for the Hickory Museum of Art. Nice work Lisë.