university musical society 39th Annual ch tuber University of Michigan • Ann Arbor Hagen Quartet Sunday, October 28, 4 pm Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre Presented in memory of David Eklund. St. Petersburg Conservatory Chamber Ensemble Tuesday, October 30, 8 pm Michigan Theater SPONSORED B Y slityE w' ..REAL TORS Brentano String Quartet and Mark Strand Haydn's Seven Last Words of Christ poet Sunday, January 13, 4 pm Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre Media Sponsor Michigan Radio Da Camera of Houston Marcel Proust's Paris Saturday, January 26, 8 pm Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre SPONSORED BY CART IL1.P Media Sponsor Michigan Radio UMS/UM Co-Commission! Harolyn Blackwell soprano Florence Quivar mezzo-soprano From the Diary of Sally Hemings Wednesday, February 13, 8 pm Sunday, February 17, 4 pm Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre Media Sponsors Michigan Radio 8 WGTE 91.3 FM Da Camera of Houston Epigraph for a Condemned Book Sarah Rothenberg director and piano Music by Frederic Chopin Texts by Charles Baudelaire Wednesday, March 20, 8 pm Power Center Presented with the generous support of Beverley and Gerson Geltner. This performance is co-produced by UMS and the University of Michigan. Media Sponsor Michigan Radio Emerson String Quartet and the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio Friday, April 5, 8 pm Michigan Theater. Presented with the generous support of Maurice and Linda Binkow. Takitcs Quartet and Robert Pinsky All the World for Love poet Saturday, April 13, 8 pm Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre SPONSORED By BORDERS Media Sponsor Michigan Radio Call to order your subscription today. Buy tickets to all 8 events, and save up to 10% off the ticket price! - ek 7/27 2001 68 1734.764.25381 www.ums.org Outside the 734 area code, call toll-free 800.221.1229 UM BOX OFFICE LOCATED IN THE POWER CENTER 121 FLETCHER ST HOURS M-F LOAM-5PM the Jewish Museum. Like Oppenheim, Chagall, the oldest of eight children, was born in a family steeped in religious life. His parents were observant chasidic Jews whose life revolved around faith and prayer. World War I displaced the shtetl culture and more than a million Jews from their homes. It was that lost world that Chagall sustained in memory and in his art. Like Oppenheim's idealized ghet- to scenes, Chagall's romanticized paintings reflect a culture that no longer exists as well as a bridge between the Old World and New. "It's a body of work primarily from the two major museums in Russia, the State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the State Russian Chagall's "Jew in Cremieux, head Museum in St. Petersburg," explains Bright Red," 1915. of French Jewry Susan Tumarkin Goodman, senior The artist endows in Paris, in 1842 curator-at-large at the Jewish in recognition of the beggar with the Museum and curator of the exhibi- spirituality of a the efforts of tion. "These are the works which migrant holy man world Jewish Chagall left behind when he left or chasidic rabbi, leaders who Russia in 1922 for good." surrounded by an arc fought publicly The exhibition begins with the of sunlight filled with to stop persecu- work of Yehuda Pen, Chagall's first the Hebrew letters tion of Jews. art teacher, who opened up a pri- from "Genesis." vate art school in Vitebsk in 1897. As a 19th-cen- tury academical- It was the first and for a time the ly trained only Jewish art school in the Pale. painter, Oppenheim also produced From Pen, Chagall learned that many works on paper, reflecting his Jewish themes were legitimate subjects abilities as a consummate draftsman. for art. Pen's greatest contribution was The earliest surviving portrait of a teaching his students, including Rothschild painted by the artist is a Chagall, that it was possible to be work on paper of James de Rothschild, both Jewish and an artist, notes who built the Paris branch of the Goodman. Equally important was banking family. Chagall's introduction to modern art, "His most unique niche is as a a crucial fact in Chagall's artistic devel- Jewish genre painter," says Goldstein. opment, she adds. "That being said, it is also incumbent Chagall made a huge leap from Pen's upon us to recognize the full range of academic paintings to his own work his artistic skill and achievements, the grounded in imagination and memory. broadness of his beauty and vision." "He had an extraordinary imagination and saw in Paris all of the latest mod- ern movements, including the wild Chagall's Unseen Wbrks colors of Fauvisiri and the breakup of Five years after Oppenheim died, space in Cubism," explains Goodman. Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Chagall left Vitebsk for further Vitebsk, a town in the Pale of study in St. Petersburg in 1909, giving Settlement, where most Jews of czarist him his first exposure to Western art. Russia lived, confined by law. painted in 1908, is the The Window, The exhibit, which includes almost earliest extant work by Chagall that 60 paintings, drawings and murals by remains in the Russian collection. Chagall and nine works of Yehuda Pen, Nostalgic for.his hometown, the Chagall's first art teacher, reflects the artist is looking out the window of his shtetl (Jewish village) culture of Vitebsk. parents' house. The work was painted Except for the murals, these works are when Chagall was a struggling 19- being seen in the United States for the year-old student in St. Petersburg and first time. The exhibit recently made reflects the artist's transition from his news when an 8x10-inch oil painting study under Pen with later works. valued at called Study for Over Vitbesk, The four years Chagall spent in $1 million, was reported stolen from