(ANSA) - ROME, SEPTEMBER 13 - "Even my Russia will love me".
It is with these words, already full of nostalgia, that Marc Chagall in 1921 concludes "Ma Vie", his illustrated autobiography, in Berlin.
He is only 34 years old, but he is aware that that exile, even if only at the beginning, will not be temporary.
This time, the separation from "his" Russia, with which he has also had quite a few clashes, will be definitive.
Those words now give the title to the great exhibition curated by Claudia Zevi, which this autumn will bring the master of the painting of happiness, dreams and fairy tales, to the halls of Palazzo Roverella in Rovigo.
Not a bird's eye excursus on his omnia work.
On the other hand, "Marc Chagall my Russia will love me too", initially expected in early 2020 and, due to coronavirus, now scheduled from September 19 to January 17, chooses a specific theme: the influence that Russian popular culture has had on the whole his production, in the first twenty years of the twentieth century spent in his homeland and, equally prominently, in the paintings of the following years in Paris, in America and in the south of France.
Born in Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus, on July 7, 1887 in a Jewish family of modest conditions, the young Chagall, who arrived in St. Petersburg at the age of 20 to study at the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, will have a very long career, but all his life it will be marked by the historical and political events of the early twentieth century.
Russia, however, always remains the place of roots: a strong and passionate bond, explored in the exhibition at Palazzo Roverella, through a selection of over one hundred works, with about 70 paintings on canvas and paper.
Plus two extraordinary series of etchings and etchings, published just in the early years of his distance: "Ma Vie", with twenty tables that illuminate his precocious and painful autobiography, and "Leanime morte" by Gogol, the most profound look at the Russian soul of great literature.
(HANDLE).