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Eventually he wheedled his parents into letting him study at real art schools: first, with a provincial portraitist and genre painter auspiciously named Pen, later at an academy in St. Petersburg. He proved an apt pupil, but from the beginning found his own world of fantasy in the unlikely, barren, mud-splattered town of his birth. For to Chagall, even Vitebsk's corrugated iron roofs were beautiful. "All about us—churches, fences, shops, synagogues—simple and eternal," he wrote, "like the buildings in the frescoes of Giotto." Just as Dublin provided a lifelong source of art for James Joyce, Chagall has returned endlessly to Vitebsk. Recalling his youth in a fanciful autobiography, My Life, written in 1922 when he was 35, he established in its opening sentences his immense empathy for his folk origins. "The first thing I ever saw," he wrote, "was a trough. Simple, square, half hollow, half oval. A market trough. Once inside, I filled it completely."
Fiddler on the Roof. Even everyday happenings became magical when viewed through the lens of his poetic eye. And indeed the alternately joyful and mournful Hasidic community in which he lived furnished enough material for any youngster's imaginings. There was his grandfather, a butcher who once disappeared during a Jewish festival, was later discovered sitting on a rooftop, quietly munching carrots. There was Uncle Neuch, who "played the violin like a shoemaker." (Later Chagall was to say that he works on his pictures from all sides, "as shoemakers do.") And there were the commonplaces that usher a young boy into adulthood.
One such event later became the subject of his first real masterwork, The Dead Man, painted in 1908 when he was 21. It shows a corpse lying in the street surrounded by candles. Near by, a woman shrieks. In the distance is Uncle Neuch, fiddling on the rooftop of a store bearing a shoemaker's sign. Wrote Chagall of the actual incident: "The dead man, solemnly sad is already laid out on the floor, his face illumined by six candles. In the end, they carry him away. Our street is no longer the same. I do not recognize it." The encounter with death bent his brush to his first flurries of forceful expressionism.
Into the Beehive. Folk art might have proved Chagall's finale. But in 1910, a St. Petersburg lawyer named Vinaver became his first important patron, paid for a trip to Paris and sent him a handsome allowance of 125 francs (in those days about $24) each month. East and West met in Chagall's art in Paris after he visited the Salon d'Automne. There, Bonnard, Matisse and dozens more enthralled him. The process of melding the illogical, emotional art of Russia with the logical discipline of the School of Paris began.
He found a studio near Montparnasse in La Ruche ("The Beehive"), a famous twelve-sided wooden structure divided into wedge-shaped rooms. Chaim Soutine, a fellow Russian Jew, and Modigliani lived on the same floor, but Chagall, still diffident and unsure, preferred to pal around with poets. His closest friend at the time was the Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars, whom Chagall let title some of his paintings. In return, Cendrars drew his word portrait of the artist in 1913:
He's asleep
He's awake
Right away he's painting