Marc Chagall: The Joy of Earth’s Gravity

The new exhibit Marc Chagall: The Joy of Earth’s Gravity at the Moscow’s Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts features numerous items related to or written in Yiddish. World famous as a painter, Chagall also wrote poetry and articles on literature and art in his mother tongue, Yiddish. He was a close friend of many Yiddish authors whose books he illustrated.

The exhibit, which will remain open till March 15, 2026, is accompanied with quotes from Chagall’s autobiography My Life, and dedicated to the artist’s work in Russia from the late 1900s to 1922. Some of the items from private collections are presented to the public for the first time.

The most prominent feature of the new exhibition is a huge composition of seven enormous murals painted by Chagall for the Jewish Chamber Theater in 1920. Another, more humble and yet very important item is a rare 1917 edition of Der Nister’s fairytales with Chagall’s illustrations. An electronic installation next to it shows magnified pages of this book.

Photo credit: Y. and D. Matveyev