Name	The Weepies
Years active	2001–present
Origin	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Genre	Folk rock, acoustic rock.
Label	Nettwerk
Current members	Steve TannenDeb Talan
Url	http://theweepies.com
Background	group_or_band

The Weepies are an indie pop-folk band fronted by singer-songwriters Deb Talan and Steve Tannen. Their music has been described as "subtly intoxicating folk-pop".

History

The two musicians, who were both active in separate singer-songwriter careers, met in 2001 at a show Tannen was playing at Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They quickly found a deep musical bond and began playing together. In 2005, they were signed to Nettwerk Records. Talan and Tannen are married and reside together in Los Angeles, California with their two sons Theo & Alexander.

Other supporting members who have recorded and toured with The Weepies include Meghan Toohey on keyboards and electric guitar.

The band received mainstream attention with their second album, Say I Am You. In February 2006, the album reached #1 on iTunes' list of most-downloaded folk albums in eight countries. The single "World Spins Madly On" from that album hit #1 on iTunes' US folk song charts. In 2007, the band collaborated with Mandy Moore, writing and playing on her new album, Wild Hope. The Weepies' recorded their next album at home, with the aid of fellow musicians and friends; Hideaway was released in April 2008 by Nettwerk Records. Hideaway marked the Weepies' first entrance into the Billboard Top 200, charting at #31 and selling 14,000 copies in its first week.

Songs by The Weepies have been featured on many popular TV shows, including Grey's Anatomy, Everwood, One Tree Hill, Scrubs, The Riches, How I Met Your Mother, Gossip Girl, GRΣΣK, Kyle XY, Life Unexpected, and Dirty Sexy Money, the last of which involved an on-screen performance by The Weepies as one of the show's subplots. They have also been featured in the Sex and the City Movie.

The Weepies' song "Can't Go Back Now" was featured in a prominent campaign ad for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. In 2007, the songs "Stars" and "All That I Want" were featured in holiday advertisement campaigns for Old Navy and JC Penney, respectively. Their song "Can't Go Back Now" was played over the end credits of the movie 'Adam".

The Weepies' fourth full-length album, Be My Thrill, was released in August 2010. The band has announced plans for a 36 city tour of the U.S., beginning with a show in Los Angeles on October 10, 2010.

Discography

Studio albums

2003: Happiness

2006: Say I Am You

2008: Hideaway

2010: Be My Thrill

EPs

2003: Live Session EP (iTunes Exclusive)

Tour

2006: Say I Am You Tour

2010: Be My Thrill Tour

References

External links

The Weepies Official Site

The Weepies MySpace Page

The Weepies on folkmusic.about.com

The Weepies on Last.fm

The Weepies collection at the Internet Archive's live music archive

The Weepies Hideaway review

Category:2000s music groups Category:American pop music groups Category:American folk musical groups Category:Musical groups from California Category:Married couples

Name	Marc Chagall
Caption	Photo taken 1921 in Paris
Birthname	Moishe Shagal
Birthdate	7 July 1887
Birth place	Liozna, near Vitebsk, Russian Empire (now in Belarus)
Deathdate	March 28, 1985
Deathplace	Saint-Paul, France
Nationality	Russian, later known as French
Ethnicity	Belorussian-Jewish
Field	Painting, stained glass
Movement	Surrealism, Expressionism
Works	see List of Chagall's artwork

Marc Chagall (, }}; ; ; 7 July 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Belarusian (that time Russian Empire) French artist, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He created unique works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall's haunting, exuberant, and poetic images have wide appeal, with art critic Robert Hughes referring to him as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."

As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the 20th century, Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known paintings of our time. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists." For decades he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist." Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the United Nations, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including the ceiling for the Paris Opéra.

His most vital work was made on the eve of World War I, when he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his visions of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent his wartime years in Russia, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avante-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

He was known to have two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism, and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's golden age in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism." Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk." "When Matisse dies", Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is."

Early life and education

Home life

Marc Chagall, born Moishe Shagal, was born in Liozna, near the city of Vitebsk (Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire) in 1887. At the time of his birth, Vitebsk's population was around 66,000, with half the population being Jewish. His father, Khatskl (Zakhar) Shagal, was employed by a herring merchant; and his mother, Feige-Ite, sold groceries from their home. His father worked hard, carrying heavy barrels but earning only 20 roubles a month. Chagall would later include fish motifs "out of respect for his father", writes Chagall biographer, Jacob Baal-Teshuva. Chagall wrote of these early years:

During the previous decades, the Jewish population of the town survived numerous government-organized attacks (pogroms), prejudice, segregation, and discrimination. As a result, they created their own schools, synagogues, hospitals, a cemetery, and other community institutions. One of their key sources of income was from the manufacture of clothing that was sold throughout Russia. They also made furniture and various agricultural tools. Art historian and curator Susan Tumarkin Goodman writes that for religious and economic reasons from the late 18th century to the First World War, Russia confined Jews to living within the Pale of Settlement, which included sections of modern Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and the Baltic States. This caused the natural creation of Jewish market-villages (shtetls) throughout today's Eastern Europe, with their own markets, culture, and religious observances. Lewis adds, "As cosmopolitan an artist as he would later become, his storehouse of visual imagery would never expand beyond the landscape of his childhood, with its snowy streets, wooden houses, and ubiquitous fiddlers... [with] scenes of childhood so indelibly in one's mind and to invest them with an emotional charge so intense that it could only be discharged obliquely through an obsessive repetition of the same cryptic symbols and ideograms... " Bakst, also Jewish, was a designer of decorative art and was famous as a draftsman designer of stage sets and costumes for the 'Ballets Russes,' and helped Chagall by acting as a role model for Jewish success. Bakst moved to Paris a year later. Art historian Raymond Cogniat writes that after living and studying art on his own for four years, "Chagall entered into the mainstream of contemporary art. ...His apprenticeship over, Russia had played a memorable initial role in his life.

Chagall stayed in St. Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met and fell in love with Bella Rosenfeld. In My Life Chagall described his first meeting her: "Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me." Art historian Jean Leymarie observes that Chagall began thinking of art as "emerging from the internal being outward, from the seen object to the psychic outpouring", which was the reverse of the Cubist way of creating.

He therefore developed friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde luminaries such as Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger. Baal-Teshuva writes that "Chagall's dream of Paris, the city of light and above all, of freedom, had come true." Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people temporarily living in Marseilles who were waiting to emigrate to America:

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After prodding by their daughter Ida, who "perceived the need to act fast,"

Subject matters

From life memories to fantasy

Chagall's early life left him with a "powerful visual memory and a pictorial intelligence", writes Goodman. After living in France and experiencing the atmosphere of artistic freedom, his "vision soared and he created a new reality, one that drew on both his inner and outer worlds." But it was the images and memories of his early years in Russia that would sustain his art for more than 70 years.

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Other types of art

Stained glass windows

windows in Saint-Stephen Cathedral, Metz, France ]]

One of Chagall's major contributions to art has been his work with stained glass. This medium allowed him to further express his desire to create intense and fresh colors and had the added benefit of natural light and refraction interacting and constantly changing. Everything from the position where the view stood to the weather outside would alter the visual affect. It was not until 1956, when he was nearly 70 years of age, that he designed windows for the church at Assy, his first major project. Then, from 1958 to 1960, he created windows for the Metz Cathedral.

;Jerusalem Windows (1962)

In 1960, he began creating stained glass windows for the synagogue of Hebrew University's Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. Leymarie writes that "in order to iluminate the synagogue both spiritually and physically", it was decided that the twelve windows, representing the twelve tribes of Israel, were to be filled with stained glass. Chagall envisaged the synagogue as "a crown offered to the Jewish Queen", and the windows as "jewels of translucent fire", she writes. Chagall then devoted the next two years to the task, and upon completion in 1961 the windows were exhibited in Paris and then the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were permanently installed in Jerusalem in February 1962. Each of the twelve windows is approximately ll feet high and wide, much larger than anything he had done before. Cogniat considers them to be "his greatest work in the field of stained glass", although Virginia Haggard McNeil records Chagall's disappointment that they were to be lit with artificial light, and so would not change according to the conditions of natural light.

French philosopher Gaston Bachelard commented that "Chagall reads the Bible and suddenly the passages become light." In 1967 he dedicated a stained-glass window to John D. Rockefeller in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York.

;St. Stephen's church in Mainz, Germany (1978) In 1978 he began creating windows for St. Stephen's church in Mainz, Germany. Today, 200,000 visitors a year visit the church, and "tourists from the whole world pilgrim up St. Stephen's Mount, to see the glowing blue stained glass windows by the artist Marc Chagall", states the city's web site. St. Stephen's is the only German church for which the Chagall has created windows."

The website also notes, "The colours address our vital consciousness directly, because they tell of optimism, hope and delight in life", says Monsignor Klaus Mayer, who imparts Chagall's work in mediations and books. He established contact with Chagall in 1973, and succeeded in persuading the "master of colour and the biblical message" to set a sign for Jewish-Christian attachment and international understanding. Centuries earlier Mainz had been "the capital of European Jewry", and contained the largest Jewish community in Europe, notes historian John Man. In 1978, at the age of 91, Chagall fitted the first window and eight more followed. Watch video. Chagall's co artist Charles Marq complemented Chagall's work by adding several stained glass windows using the typical colours of Chagall.

;All Saints' Church, Tudeley, UK (1963–1978) All Saints’ Tudeley is the only church in the world to have all its twelve windows decorated by Chagall. (The other two religious buildings with complete sets of Chagall windows are the Hadassah Medical Center synagogue and the Chapel of Le Saillant, Limousin.)

The windows at Tudeley are a memorial tribute to Sarah d'Avigdor-Goldsmid who died in 1963 aged just 21 in a sailing accident off Rye. Sarah was the daughter of Sir Henry d'Avigdor-Goldsmid and Lady Rosemary who commissioned Chagall to design the magnificent east window, which was installed in 1967.

Over the next 15 years, Chagall designed the remaining windows, again made in collaboration with the glassworker Charles Marq in his workshop at Reims in northern France.

Murals, theater sets and costumes

Chagall first worked on stage designs in 1914 while living in Russia. It was during this period in the Russian theatre that formerly static ideas of stage design were, according to Cogniat, "being swept away in favor of a wholly arbitrary sense of space with different dimensions, perspectives, colors and rhythms."

After leaving Russia, twenty years passed before he was again offered a chance to design theatre sets. In the years between, his paintings still included harlequins, clowns and acrobats, which Cogniat notes "convey his sentimental attachment to and nostalgia for the theatre." Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12 floor mosaics and a wall mosaic.

Ceramics and sculpture

Chagall began learning about ceramics and sculpture while living in south France. Ceramics became a fashion in the Côte d'Azur with various workshops starting up at Antibes, Vence and Vallauris. He took classes along with other known artists including Picasso and Fernand Léger. At first Chagall painted existing pieces of pottery but soon expanded into designing his own, which began his work as a sculptor as a compliment to his painting.

After experimenting with pottery and dishes he moved into large ceramic murals. However, he was never satisfied with the limits imposed by the square tile segments which Cogniat notes "imposed on him a discipline which prevented the creation of a plastic image."

He came from nowhere to achieve worldwide acclaim. Yet his fractured relationship with his Jewish identity was "unresolved and tragic", Davies states. He would have died with no Jewish rites, had not a Jewish stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over his coffin."

Through his imagination and strong memories Chagall was able to use typical motifs and subjects in most of his work: village scenes, peasant life, and intimate views of the small world of the Jewish village (shtetl). His tranquil figures and simple gestures helped produce a "monumental sense of dignity" by translating everyday Jewish rituals into a "timeless realm of iconic peacefulness."

In 1982, in Stockholm, Sweden the Moderna Museet organized a retrospective exhibition which later traveled to Denmark.

In 1985, the Royal Academy in London presented a major retrospective which later moved to Philadelphia. Chagall was too old to attend the London opening and died a few months later.

In 2003 a major retrospective of Chagall's career was organized by the Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, in conjunction with the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Nice, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

;Postage stamp tributes Because of the international acclaim he enjoyed and the popularity of his art, a number of countries have issued commemorative stamps in his honor depicting examples from his works. In 1963 France issued a stamp of his painting, "The Married Couple of the Eiffel Tower." Israel, in 1969 produced a stamp depicting his "King David" painting. And in 1973 Israel released a 12-stamp set with images of the stained-glass windows that he created for the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center Synagogue. Each window was made to signify one of the "Twelve Tribes of Israel".

In 1987, as a tribute to recognize the centennial of his birth in Russia, seven nations engaged in a special omnibus program and released stamps in his honor. The countries which issued the stamps included Antigua & Barbuda, Dominica, The Gambia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Grenada, which together produced 48 stamps and 10 souvenir sheets. Although the stamps all portray his various masterpieces, the names of the artwork are not listed on the stamps.

The Lincoln Center in New York City, contains Chagall's huge murals; The Sources of Music and The Triumph of Music are installed in the lobby of the new Metropolitan Opera House, which opened in 1966. Also in New York, the United Nations Headquarters has a stained glass wall of his work. In 1967 the UN commemorated this artwork with a postage stamp and souvenir sheet.

The family home on Pokrovskaya Street, Vitebsk, is now the Marc Chagall Museum.

The regional art museum in Novosibirsk has a Chagall exhibition on his biblical subjects between 16 June 2010 and 29 August 2010.

The Museum of Biblical Art in Dallas, Texas currently hosts many of his works as well.

See also

Apocalypse in Lilac, Capriccio

I and the Village

La Mariée (The Bride)

References

Bibliography

Alexander, Sidney, Marc Chagall: A Biography G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1978.

Monica Bohm-Duchen, Chagall (Art & Ideas) Phaidon 1998. ISBN 0-7148-3160-3

Chagall, Marc, My Life Peter Owen Ltd, 1965 (2003) ISBN 978-0-7206-1186-1

Compton, Susann, Chagall Harry N. Abrams, 1985.

Harshav, Benjamin, Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative, Stanford University Press, 2004. ISBN 978-0-8047-4214-6

Kamensky, Aleksandr, Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia, Trilistnik, Moscow, 2005 (In Russian)

Kamensky, Aleksandr, Chagall: The Russian Years 1907-1922., Rizzoli, New York, 1988 (Abridged version of Marc Chagall, An Artist From Russia) ISBN 0-8478-1080-1

Nikolaj, Aaron, Marc Chagall., (Monographie) Reinbek 2003 (In German)

Shishanov V.A. Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art – a history of creation and a collection. 1918-1941. – Minsk: Medisont, 2007. – 144 p.

Wilson, Jonathan Marc Chagall, Schocken, 2007 ISBN 0-8052-4201-5

Wullschlager, Jackie. Chagall: A Biography Knopf, 2008

External links

Official site of Marc Chagall Museum in Vitebsk, Belarus

Official site of Marc Chagall Museum in Nice, France

Marc Chagall at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Marc Chagall at Olga's Gallery

Pictures of: Me and My Village, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, and Chagall's illustrations to the Bible: Song of Songs III (1960), Jacob's Dream (1954-67), Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (1954-67), and Abraham and the Three Angels (1954-67)

Column about revivals of "Fiddler on the Roof"

Marc Chagall Website

Union List of Artist Names, Getty Vocabularies. ULAN Full Record Display for Marc Chagall. Getty Vocabulary Program, Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California.

Video slideshows

Jerusalem Windows 3 min.

Slideshow 8 min., music by Itzhak Perlman

Slideshow 10 min. with modern music

Chagall windows in Jerusalem Israel, 1.5 min. with music

"Shagal's Passion" Russian-made animation about Chagall, 7 minutes with European music

"Fiddler on the Roof" painting animated 1 min.

Slideshow - early memories and village scenes 6 min. with classical piano

Slideshow 6 min., with classical music

Daphnis and Chloe lithographs">Slideshow – Daphnis and Chloe lithographs France, 8 min., music by Ravel

Category:1887 births Category:1985 deaths Category:People from Liozna Raion Category:Belarusian Jews Category:Russian painters Category:Russian artists Category:Belarusian painters Category:Erasmus Prize winners Category:Jewish artists Category:French painters Category:Jewish painters Category:Modern painters Category:Neo-primitivism Category:Russian avant-garde Category:Russian Jews Category:French Jews Category:Soviet Jews Category:Russian stained glass artists and manufacturers Category:Yiddish-language poets Category:Surrealist artists Category:Ballet designers Category:Levites Category:Jewish artists