Marc Chagall Museum

The Marc Chagall Museum complex in Vitebsk comprises two linked sites: the house on Pokrovskaya Street where Chagall was born in 1887 and spent his early years, restored to something like its nineteenth-century condition, and the Art Centre nearby which holds a permanent collection of his graphic works — lithographs, etchings, and aquatints from across his long career. Together they give a thorough introduction to the artist and to the Jewish world of pre-war Vitebsk that shaped his imagery.

The house is the more moving of the two. The rooms are modest, and the objects in them — furniture, religious items, household effects — speak to a very particular time and place that no longer exists. The Art Centre holds about 300 works on paper, all originals. If you come to Vitebsk for one reason, it is likely this.

things to do museum
A story
Chagall left Vitebsk in 1920, never to return. When he came back in 1944 to visit — as a world-famous painter — he found that the Jewish community he had grown up in had been entirely destroyed by the Nazi occupation. The city of his childhood existed only in his paintings. He went back to France and never returned to Belarus again.