Final Years and Death
Author Serena Davies writes that "By the time he died in France in 1985—the last surviving master of European modernism, outliving Joan Miró by two years—he had experienced at first hand the high hopes and crushing disappointments of the Russian revolution, and had witnessed the end of the Pale, the near annihilation of European Jewry, and the obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a population of 240,000 survived the Second World War."
Marc Chagall's last painting was a commissioned piece of art for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The maquette painting titled “Job” was completed for the commission however he died during the final days of the Job tapestry fabrication. His last piece of art was for all disabled people of the world.
His relationship with his Jewish identity was "unresolved and tragic", Davies states. He would have died without Jewish rites, had not a Jewish stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over his coffin.
Read more about this topic: Marc Chagall
Famous quotes containing the words final, years and/or death:
“The final aim is not to know, but to be.... Youve got to know yourself so that you can at last be yourself. Be yourself is the last motto.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Every constitution..., and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years [a generation]. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right.”
—Thomas Jefferson (17431826)
“There is no sorrow more grievous than the death of ones spirit.”
—Chinese proverb.
Zhaungzi.