“Chagall came from the marvellous world of the East that had always refused the use of images; still, he appropriated the theme so far as to make of it a meditation on painting: Chagall’s features are openly presented in the painter’s self-portraits, faces are concealed inside the very heart of a picture. The artist, to whom contemporary critics denied any theoretical scope, realized he was also a philosopher”. That is the core of the first part of the volume. The second part reveals that he was also a reader of history. That is Sylvie Forestier’s masterful interpretation of the triptych Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation (1937-1952). Chagall transformed an old painting, Revolution, into a triptych, on which he worked for fifteen years. He completed it (Liberation) in Paris after World War II, after he returned from his American exile, during which his first wife Bella had died. But it was in America that Chagall found the theatrical stage. The third part of this volume is devoted to Chagall’s relationship with the theatre. It was above all for the Jewish theatre of the art that Chagall realized his most relevant projects; in this area he showed his dazzling ability to create a theatrical space, where his freedom to create was totally at the service of the actor and the text. In New York and, after the war, in Paris, he returned to the theatre and to the human comedy, with the ballets of Chaikovsky, Stravinsky, Ravel.

Summary
• First part: Faces and self-portraits
• Second part: Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation
• Third part: The theatrical stage