What Happened on September 23rd – Chagall’s Ceiling

On this September 23, 1964, the Paris Opera unveils its new ceiling which was painted as a gift by Belorussian-born artist Marc Chagall.  It was typical of his masterpieces with its childlike simplicity, luminous with colors and of a dream world.

Paris Opera Ceiling by Marc Chagall

Who was Marc Chagall?

Marc Chagall

• Born in the town of Vitebsk in the Russian empire in 1887.
• His parents were Jewish merchants.
• The Jewish and Russian folkloric themes to which he was exposed in his youth influenced his artwork
• He took up drawing as a child and in 1906 went to St. Petersburg to study art with the help of a rich Jewish patron.
• In 1908, he was invited to the Zvantseva School to study under the prestigious theater designer Leon Bakst
• In 1908 he produced one of his great works, The Dead Man, a nightmarish painting inspired by a brush with death.

The Dead Man, Marc Chagall 1908

• In 1910, another Jewish patron sent Chagall to Paris, rescuing him from what might have been a career confined to folk art.
• In Paris he was embraced by avant-garde artists who encouraged him to exploit the seemingly irrational tendencies of his art.
• His  I and the Village (1911) generated widespread enthusiasm.

I and the Village, Marc Chagall

• Chagall entered the artistic phase that many viewed as his best. His pictures, wrought in a variety of artistic mediums, showed a fantastical world in which people, animals, and other figurative elements were cast in bright and unusual colors and seemed to dance and float across the canvas.
• He had his first one-man show in Berlin in 1914,
• With the outbreak of World War I, Chagall was stranded in Russia during a visit to Vitebsk.
• He welcomed the Russian Revolution of 1917, which provided full citizenship for Russian Jews and brought official recognition of Chagall and his art.
• He was made a commissar for art in the Vitebsk region and helped establish a local museum and art academy.
• He was soon frustrated by aesthetic and political quarrels and in 1922 left Soviet Russia for the West.
• He was welcomed as an idol by the Surrealists, who saw in Chagall paintings like Paris Through the Window (1913) an important precursor to their own irrational and dream-like art.

Paris Through the Window, Marc Chagall 1913

• He took up engraving and produced hundreds of illustrations for special editions of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables, and the Bible.
• In 1941, he fled with his wife from Nazi-occupied Paris to the United States, where he lived in and around New York City for seven years.
• War-induced pessimism and sadness over the death of his wife infused much of his art from this period, as seen in the Yellow Crucifixion (1943) and Around Her (1945).

• In 1945, he designed the sets and costumes for the New York production of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. 
• In 1946 Chagall was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.
• In 1948, he returned to France, and eventually settled in the French Riviera village of St. Paul de Vence, his home for the rest of his life.
• In 1958, he designed the sets and costumes for a production of Maurice Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloe at the Paris Opera.
• In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he produced stained-glass windows, first for a cathedral in Metz, France, and then for a synagogue in Jerusalem.
• In 1964, Chagall completed a stained-glass window for the United Nations building in New York that was dedicated to the late Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold.

Chagall’s stained glass at the United Nations.

• Andre Malraux, the French minister of culture, commissioned him to design a new ceiling for the Paris Opera after seeing Chagall’s work in Daphnis et Chloe.
• Working with a surface of 560 square meters, Chagall divided the ceiling into color zones that he filled with landscapes and figures representing the luminaries of opera and ballet.
• The ceiling was unveiled on September 23, 1964, during a performance of the same Daphnis et Chloe.

• As usual, a few detractors condemned Chagall’s work as overly primitive, but this criticism was drowned out in the general acclaim for the work.
• In 1966, as a gift to the city that had sheltered him during World War II, he painted two vast murals for New York’s Metropolitan Opera House (1966).

Murals at the New York Metropolitan Opera

• In 1977, France honored Chagall with a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in Paris. He continued to work vigorously until his death in 1985 at the age of 97.

Time Traveling at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire

Hello.  My name is Rosie.  Today began normally but now I am not so sure.  I caught the bus to my job at the munitions factory this morning like I’ve been doing every day.  When my man went to war, I went to work like many of my women friends.  I’ve been working so hard, I guess I was over tired because I must have fallen asleep.  Before I knew it, the bus driver was shaking me awake and telling me it’s the end of the line and I have to get off the bus.  When I stepped down onto the street, I knew something was wrong.  I wasn’t at the factory.  I don’t want to tell you where my factory is located because we are warned every day.  You know “Loose Lips Sink Ships” and the like but I was definitely not there.  I looked around and there were all kinds of people dressed in all kinds of strange clothing.  Some of them looked like the drawings I remember from my school books or some of those paintings at the museum but others were like nothing I’ve seen before.  The cars in the parking lot were strange to me too.  There wasn’t a Nash or a DeSoto among them.  For everything I was seeing and hearing, I knew I wasn’t in 1942 any longer.  Maybe I should see a doctor.  I heard several references to Doctor Who.  I guess no one knows his name but I better find him and find out what happened to me.  Oh maybe I should get help at that blue police box over there.

The Tardis has landed in the picnic grove at the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire

What Happened on September 15th – Marilyn Monroe, A Skirt and a Subway Vent

The iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe and the subway blast

On September 15, 1954, the famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, laughing as her skirt is blown up by a blast from a subway vent is shot during the filming of The Seven Year Itch.  Her husband at the time, baseball player, Joe DiMaggio did not like the photograph and they divorced soon afterwards.  The photograph is a staple of pop culture.

What Happened on September 14th – Harvard

On September 14, 1638, John Harvard, a 31-year-old clergyman from Charlestown, Massachusetts died, leaving his library and half of his estate to a local college. The young minister’s bequest allowed the college to firmly establish itself. In honor of its first benefactor, the school adopted the name Harvard College.

John Harvard

Founded by the General Court of Massachusetts in 1636, Harvard is America’s oldest institution of higher learning. From a college of nine students and one instructor, it has grown into a world-renowned university with over 18,000 degree candidates and 2,000 faculty members, including numerous Nobel laureates. Situated a few miles west of Boston on the Charles River in Cambridge, Harvard’s main campus is one of the country’s most scenic. With an endowment of $11 billion, the university is the country’s wealthiest.

There have been many famous alumni over Harvard’s many years.  To see this distinctive list, click here: Harvard famous alumni.

What Happened on September 9th – United Colonies Replaced with United States

In the Congressional declaration dated September 9, 1776, the delegates wrote, “That in all continental commissions, and other instruments, where, heretofore, the words ‘United Colonies’ have been used, the stile be altered for the future to the “United States.”

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence, showing the five-man committee in charge of drafting the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 as it presents its work to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia

Seems like our founding fathers could have benefitted from search and replace technology.  On September 9, 1776, the Continental Congress formally declares the name of the new nation to be the “United States” of America. This replaced the term “United Colonies,” which had been in general use.

Richard Henry Lee

A resolution by Richard Henry Lee, which had been presented to Congress on June 7 and approved on July 2, 1776, issued the resolve, “That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States….” As a result, John Adams thought July 2 would be celebrated as “the most memorable epoch in the history of America.” Instead, the day has been largely forgotten in favor of July 4, when Jefferson’s edited Declaration of Independence was adopted. That document also states, “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES.” However, Lee began with the line, while Jefferson saved it for the middle of his closing paragraph.

What Happened on September 1st – A World War I Soldier Writes Home

French soldiers during the Battle Of Verdun

Excerpts of an American soldier’s letter from September 1, 1917.  The letter (not complete below) was written when he was on leave in Paris.

Dear Lois,

Enjoying the luxuries of life including ice cream, sheets, cafes and things. The French have a saying to the effect that no one comes out of Verdun the same. As the fighting is stiff there always the statement is probably true for all times, it certainly is true of Verdun during an attack. It would take a book to tell about all that happened there and when I try to write, little incidents entirely unconnected come to my mind so I don’t know where or how to begin. Besides the desolation visible to the eye there was the desolation visible to the nose. You could often see old bones, boots, clothing and things besides lots of recent ones. Something hit me on the head, making a big dent in my helmet and raising a bump on my head. If it hadn’t been for my helmet my head would have been cracked. As it was I was dazed, knocked down and my gas mask knocked off. I got several breathes [sic] of the strong solution right from the shell before it got diluted with much air. If it hadn’t been for the fellow with me I probably wouldn’t be writing this letter because I couldn’t see, my eyes were running water and burning, so was my nose and I could hardly breathe. I gasped, choked and felt the extreme terror of the man who goes under in the water and will clutch at a straw. The fellow with me grabbed me and led me the hundred yards or so to the post where the doctor gave me a little stuff and where I became alright again in a few hours except that I was a little intoxicated from the gas for a while. I had other close calls but that was the closest and shook me up most. I think the hardest thing I did was to go back again alone the next night. I had to call myself names before I got up nerve enough.

W. Stull Holt

That soldier was Stull Holt.  Born in New York City in 1896, he served during World War I as a driver with the American Ambulance Field Service.  He later joined the American Air Service with a pilot commission as a first lieutenant.  In his letter, he writes of the fortress city of Verdun where there was extensive fighting between the French and Germans in 1916 and throughout 1917.  Holt’s letters were later published in The Great War at Home and Abroad: The World War I Diaries and Letters of W. Stull Holt (1999).

When I happened upon this event on this day in history, I found a man that is so much more than this story.  Click here for an University of Washington Alumni Magazine article about W. Stull Holt