title: Marc Chagall

text: Between 1908 and 1910, Chagall was a student of Léon Bakst at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting. While in Saint Petersburg, he discovered experimental theater and the work of such artists as Paul Gauguin. 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."


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall stayed in Saint Petersburg until 1910, often visiting Vitebsk where he met 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." Bella later wrote, of meeting him, "When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they'd fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes … long, almond-shaped … and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat."


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1910, Chagall relocated to Paris to develop his artistic style. Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form, and French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th century". But Chagall arrived from Russia with "a ripe color gift, a fresh, unashamed response to sentiment, a feeling for simple poetry and a sense of humor", he adds. These notions were alien to Paris at that time, and as a result, his first recognition came not from other painters but from poets such as Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire. 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.


title: Marc Chagall

text: He therefore developed friendships with Guillaume Apollinaire and other avant-garde artists including 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." His first days were a hardship for the 23-year-old Chagall, who was lonely in the big city and unable to speak French. Some days he "felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he painted, about the riches of Slavic folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and especially Bella".


title: Marc Chagall

text: In Paris, he enrolled at Académie de La Palette, an avant-garde school of art where the painters Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier taught, and also found work at another academy. He would spend his free hours visiting galleries and salons, especially the Louvre; artists he came to admire included Rembrandt, the Le Nain brothers, Chardin, van Gogh, Renoir, Pissarro, Matisse, Gauguin, Courbet, Millet, Manet, Monet, Delacroix, and others. It was in Paris that he learned the technique of gouache, which he used to paint Belarusian scenes. He also visited Montmartre and the Latin Quarter "and was happy just breathing Parisian air."


title: Marc Chagall

text: During his time in Paris, Chagall was constantly reminded of his home in Vitebsk, as Paris was also home to many painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigrés from the Russian Empire. However, "night after night he painted until dawn", only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of the big city at night. "My homeland exists only in my soul", he once said. He continued painting Jewish motifs and subjects from his memories of Vitebsk, although he included Parisian scenes—- the Eiffel Tower in particular, along with portraits. Many of his works were updated versions of paintings he had made in Russia, transposed into Fauvist or Cubist keys.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall developed a whole repertoire of quirky motifs: ghostly figures floating in the sky, ... the gigantic fiddler dancing on miniature dollhouses, the livestock and transparent wombs and, within them, tiny offspring sleeping upside down. The majority of his scenes of life in Vitebsk were painted while living in Paris, and "in a sense they were dreams", notes Lewis. Their "undertone of yearning and loss", with a detached and abstract appearance, caused Apollinaire to be "struck by this quality", calling them "surnaturel!" His "animal/human hybrids and airborne phantoms" would later become a formative influence on Surrealism. Chagall, however, did not want his work to be associated with any school or movement and considered his own personal language of symbols to be meaningful to himself. But Sweeney notes that others often still associate his work with "illogical and fantastic painting", especially when he uses "curious representational juxtapositions".


title: Marc Chagall

text: Sweeney writes that "This is Chagall's contribution to contemporary art: the reawakening of a poetry of representation, avoiding factual illustration on the one hand, and non-figurative abstractions on the other". André Breton said that "with him alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return to modern painting".


title: Marc Chagall

text: Because he missed his fiancée, Bella, who was still in Vitebsk—"He thought about her day and night", writes Baal-Teshuva—and was afraid of losing her, Chagall decided to accept an invitation from a noted art dealer in Berlin to exhibit his work, his intention being to continue on to Belarus, marry Bella, and then return with her to Paris. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited. The exhibit, held at Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery was a huge success, "The German critics positively sang his praises."


title: Marc Chagall

text: After the exhibit, he continued on to Vitebsk, where he planned to stay only long enough to marry Bella. However, after a few weeks, the First World War began, closing the Russian border for an indefinite period. A year later he married Bella Rosenfeld and they had their first child, Ida. Before the marriage, Chagall had difficulty convincing Bella's parents that he would be a suitable husband for their daughter. They were worried about her marrying a painter from a poor family and wondered how he would support her. Becoming a successful artist now became a goal and inspiration. According to Lewis, "[T]he euphoric paintings of this time, which show the young couple floating balloon-like over Vitebsk—its wooden buildings faceted in the Delaunay manner—are the most lighthearted of his career". His wedding pictures were also a subject he would return to in later years as he thought about this period of his life.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1915, Chagall began exhibiting his work in Moscow, first exhibiting his works at a well-known salon and in 1916 exhibiting pictures in St. Petersburg. He again showed his art at a Moscow exhibition of avant-garde artists. This exposure brought recognition, and a number of wealthy collectors began buying his art. He also began illustrating a number of Yiddish books with ink drawings. He illustrated I. L. Peretz's "The Magician" in 1917. Chagall was 30 years old and had begun to become well known.


title: Marc Chagall

text: The October Revolution of 1917 was a dangerous time for Chagall although it also offered opportunity. Chagall wrote he came to fear Bolshevik orders pinned on fences, writing: "The factories were stopping. The horizons opened. Space and emptiness. No more bread. The black lettering on the morning posters made me feel sick at heart". Chagall was often hungry for days, later remembering watching "a bride, the beggars and the poor wretches weighted down with bundles", leading him to conclude that the new regime had turned the Russian Empire "upside down the way I turn my pictures". By then he was one of Imperial Russia's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, which enjoyed special privileges and prestige as the "aesthetic arm of the revolution". He was offered a notable position as a commissar of visual arts for the country, but preferred something less political, and instead accepted a job as commissar of arts for Vitebsk. This resulted in his founding the Vitebsk Arts College which, adds Lewis, became the "most distinguished school of art in the Soviet Union".


title: Marc Chagall

text: It obtained for its faculty some of the most important artists in the country, such as El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich. He also added his first teacher, Yehuda Pen. Chagall tried to create an atmosphere of a collective of independently minded artists, each with their own unique style. However, this would soon prove to be difficult as a few of the key faculty members preferred a Suprematist art of squares and circles, and disapproved of Chagall's attempt at creating "bourgeois individualism". Chagall then resigned as commissar and moved to Moscow.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In Moscow he was offered a job as stage designer for the newly formed State Jewish Chamber Theater. It was set to begin operation in early 1921 with a number of plays by Sholem Aleichem. For its opening he created a number of large background murals using techniques he learned from Bakst, his early teacher. One of the main murals was tall by long and included images of various lively subjects such as dancers, fiddlers, acrobats, and farm animals. One critic at the time called it "Hebrew jazz in paint". Chagall created it as a "storehouse of symbols and devices", notes Lewis. The murals "constituted a landmark" in the history of the theatre, and were forerunners of his later large-scale works, including murals for the New York Metropolitan Opera and the Paris Opera.


title: Marc Chagall

text: The First World War ended in 1918, but the Russian Civil War continued, and famine spread. The Chagalls found it necessary to move to a smaller, less expensive, town near Moscow, although Chagall now had to commute to Moscow daily, using crowded trains. In 1921, he worked as an art teacher along with his friend sculptor Isaac Itkind in a Jewish boys' shelter in suburban Malakhovka, which housed young refugees orphaned by pogroms. While there, he created a series of illustrations for the Yiddish poetry cycle "Grief" written by David Hofstein, who was another teacher at the Malakhovka shelter.


title: Marc Chagall

text: After spending the years between 1921 and 1922 living in primitive conditions, he decided to go back to France so that he could develop his art in a more comfortable country. Numerous other artists, writers, and musicians were also planning to relocate to the West. He applied for an exit visa and while waiting for its uncertain approval, wrote his autobiography, "My Life."


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1923, Chagall left Moscow to return to France. On his way he stopped in Berlin to recover the many pictures he had left there on exhibit ten years earlier, before the war began, but was unable to find or recover any of them. Nonetheless, after returning to Paris he again "rediscovered the free expansion and fulfillment which were so essential to him", writes Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings.


title: Marc Chagall

text: He formed a business relationship with French art dealer Ambroise Vollard. This inspired him to begin creating etchings for a series of illustrated books, including Gogol's "Dead Souls", the Bible, and the "La Fontaine's Fables". These illustrations would eventually come to represent his finest printmaking efforts. In 1924, he travelled to Brittany and painted "La fenêtre sur l'Île-de-Bréhat". By 1926 he had his first exhibition in the United States at the Reinhardt gallery of New York which included about 100 works, although he did not travel to the opening. He instead stayed in France, "painting ceaselessly", notes Baal-Teshuva. It was not until 1927 that Chagall made his name in the French art world, when art critic and historian Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book "Modern French Painters". However, Raynal was still at a loss to accurately describe Chagall to his readers:


title: Marc Chagall

text: During this period he traveled throughout France and the Côte d'Azur, where he enjoyed the landscapes, colorful vegetation, the blue Mediterranean Sea, and the mild weather. He made repeated trips to the countryside, taking his sketchbook. He also visited nearby countries and later wrote about the impressions some of those travels left on him:


title: Marc Chagall

text: After returning to Paris from one of his trips, Vollard commissioned Chagall to illustrate the Old Testament. Although he could have completed the project in France, he used the assignment as an excuse to travel to Israel to experience for himself the Holy Land. In 1931 Marc Chagall and his family traveled to Tel Aviv on the invitation of Meir Dizengoff. Dizengoff had previously encouraged Chagall to visit Tel Aviv in connection with Dizengoff's plan to build a Jewish Art Museum in the new city. Chagall and his family were invited to stay at Dizengoff's house in Tel Aviv, which later became Independence Hall of the State of Israel.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall ended up staying in the Holy Land for two months. Chagall felt at home in Israel where many people spoke Yiddish and Russian. According to Jacob Baal-Teshuva, "he was impressed by the pioneering spirit of the people in the kibbutzim and deeply moved by the Wailing Wall and the other holy places".


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall later told a friend that Israel gave him "the most vivid impression he had ever received". Wullschlager notes, however, that whereas Delacroix and Matisse had found inspiration in the exoticism of North Africa, he as a Jew in Israel had different perspective. "What he was really searching for there was not external stimulus but an inner authorization from the land of his ancestors, to plunge into his work on the Bible illustrations". Chagall stated that "In the East I found the Bible and part of my own being."


title: Marc Chagall

text: As a result, he immersed himself in "the history of the Jews, their trials, prophecies, and disasters", notes Wullschlager. She adds that beginning the assignment was an "extraordinary risk" for Chagall, as he had finally become well known as a leading contemporary painter, but would now end his modernist themes and delve into "an ancient past". Between 1931 and 1934 he worked "obsessively" on "The Bible", even going to Amsterdam in order to carefully study the biblical paintings of Rembrandt and El Greco, to see the extremes of religious painting. He walked the streets of the city's Jewish quarter to again feel the earlier atmosphere. He told Franz Meyer:


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall saw the Old Testament as a "human story, ... not with the creation of the cosmos but with the creation of man, and his figures of angels are rhymed or combined with human ones", writes Wullschlager. She points out that in one of his early Bible images, "Abraham and the Three Angels", the angels sit and chat over a glass of wine "as if they have just dropped by for dinner".


title: Marc Chagall

text: He returned to France and by the next year had completed 32 out of the total of 105 plates. By 1939, at the beginning of World War II, he had finished 66. However, Vollard died that same year. When the series was completed in 1956, it was published by Edition Tériade. Baal-Teshuva writes that "the illustrations were stunning and met with great acclaim. Once again Chagall had shown himself to be one of the 20th century's most important graphic artists". Leymarie has described these drawings by Chagall as "monumental" and,


title: Marc Chagall

text: Not long after Chagall began his work on the "Bible", Adolf Hitler gained power in Germany. Anti-Semitic laws were being introduced and the first concentration camp at Dachau had been established. Wullschlager describes the early effects on art:


title: Marc Chagall

text: Beginning during 1937 about twenty thousand works from German museums were confiscated as "degenerate" by a committee directed by Joseph Goebbels. Although the German press had once "swooned over him", the new German authorities now made a mockery of Chagall's art, describing them as "green, purple, and red Jews shooting out of the earth, fiddling on violins, flying through the air ... representing [an] assault on Western civilization".


title: Marc Chagall

text: After Germany invaded and occupied France, the Chagalls remained in Vichy France, unaware that French Jews, with the help of the Vichy government, were being collected and sent to German concentration camps, from which few would return. The Vichy collaborationist government, directed by Marshal Philippe Pétain, immediately upon assuming power established a commission to "redefine French citizenship" with the aim of stripping "undesirables", including naturalized citizens, of their French nationality. Chagall had been so involved with his art, that it was not until October 1940, after the Vichy government, at the behest of the Nazi occupying forces, began approving anti-Semitic laws, that he began to understand what was happening. Learning that Jews were being removed from public and academic positions, the Chagalls finally "woke up to the danger they faced". But Wullschlager notes that "by then they were trapped". Their only refuge could be America, but "they could not afford the passage to New York" or the large bond that each immigrant had to provide upon entry to ensure that they would not become a financial burden to the country.


title: Marc Chagall

text: According to Wullschlager, "[T]he speed with which France collapsed astonished everyone: the [British supported French army] capitulated even more quickly than Poland had done" a year earlier. Shock waves crossed the Atlantic... as Paris had until then been equated with civilization throughout the non-Nazi world." Yet the attachment of the Chagalls to France "blinded them to the urgency of the situation." Many other well-known Russian and Jewish artists eventually sought to escape: these included Chaïm Soutine, Max Ernst, Max Beckmann, Ludwig Fulda, author Victor Serge and prize-winning author Vladimir Nabokov, who although not Jewish himself, was married to a Jewish woman. Russian author Victor Serge described many of the people living temporarily in Marseille who were waiting to emigrate to America:


title: Marc Chagall

text: After prodding by their daughter Ida, who "perceived the need to act fast", and with help from Alfred Barr of the New York Museum of Modern Art, Chagall was saved by having his name added to the list of prominent artists whose lives were at risk and who the United States should try to extricate. Varian Fry, the American journalist, and Hiram Bingham IV, the American Vice-Consul in Marseilles, ran a rescue operation to smuggle artists and intellectuals out of Europe to the US by providing them with forged visas to the US. In April 1941, Chagall and his wife were stripped of their French citizenship. The Chagalls stayed in a hotel in Marseille where they were arrested along with other Jews. Varian Fry managed to pressure the French police to release him, threatening them of scandal. Chagall was one of over 2,000 who were rescued by this operation. He left France in May 1941, "when it was almost too late", adds Lewis. Picasso and Matisse were also invited to come to America but they decided to remain in France. Chagall and Bella arrived in New York on 23 June 1941, the day after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Ida and her husband Michel followed on the notorious refugee ship SS "Navemar" with a large case of Chagall's work. A chance post-war meeting in a French café between Ida and intelligence analyst Konrad Kellen led to Kellen carrying more paintings on his return to the United States.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Even before arriving in the United States in 1941, Chagall was awarded the Carnegie Prize third prize in 1939 for ""Les Fiancés"". After being in America he discovered that he had already achieved "international stature", writes Cogniat, although he felt ill-suited in this new role in a foreign country whose language he could not yet speak. He became a celebrity mostly against his will, feeling lost in the strange surroundings.


title: Marc Chagall

text: After a while he began to settle in New York, which was full of writers, painters, and composers who, like himself, had fled from Europe during the Nazi invasions. He lived at 4 East 74th Street. He spent time visiting galleries and museums, and befriended other artists including Piet Mondrian and André Breton.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Baal-Teshuva writes that Chagall "loved" going to the sections of New York where Jews lived, especially the Lower East Side. There he felt at home, enjoying the Jewish foods and being able to read the Yiddish press, which became his main source of information since he did not yet speak English.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Contemporary artists did not yet understand or even like Chagall's art. According to Baal-Teshuva, "they had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." The Paris School, which was referred to as 'Parisian Surrealism,' meant little to them. Those attitudes would begin to change, however, when Pierre Matisse, the son of recognized French artist Henri Matisse, became his representative and managed Chagall exhibitions in New York and Chicago in 1941. One of the earliest exhibitions included 21 of his masterpieces from 1910 to 1941. Art critic Henry McBride wrote about this exhibit for the "New York Sun":


title: Marc Chagall

text: He was offered a commission by choreographer Léonide Massine of the Ballet Theatre of New York to design the sets and costumes for his new ballet, "Aleko." This ballet would stage the words of Alexander Pushkin's verse narrative "The Gypsies" with the music of Tchaikovsky. The ballet was originally planned for a New York debut, but as a cost-saving measure it was moved to Mexico where labor costs were cheaper than in New York. While Chagall had done stage settings before while in Russia, this was his first ballet, and it would give him the opportunity to visit Mexico. While there he quickly began to appreciate the "primitive ways and colorful art of the Mexicans," notes Cogniat. He found "something very closely related to his own nature", and did all the color detail for the sets while there. Eventually, he created four large backdrops and had Mexican seamstresses sew the ballet costumes.


title: Marc Chagall

text: When the ballet premiered at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City on 8 September 1942 it was considered a "remarkable success." In the audience were other famous mural painters who came to see Chagall's work, including Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. According to Baal-Teshuva, when the final bar of music ended, "there was a tumultuous applause and 19 curtain calls, with Chagall himself being called back onto the stage again and again." The production then moved to New York, where it was presented four weeks later at the Metropolitan Opera and the response was repeated, "again Chagall was the hero of the evening". Art critic Edwin Denby wrote of the opening for the "New York Herald Tribune" that Chagall's work:


title: Marc Chagall

text: After Chagall returned to New York in 1943 current events began to interest him more, and this was represented by his art, where he painted subjects including the Crucifixion and scenes of war. He learned that the Germans had destroyed the town where he was raised, Vitebsk, and became greatly distressed. He also learned about the Nazi concentration camps. During a speech in February 1944, he described some of his feelings:


title: Marc Chagall

text: On 2 September 1944, Bella died suddenly due to a virus infection, which was not treated due to the wartime shortage of medicine. As a result, he stopped all work for many months, and when he did resume painting his first pictures were concerned with preserving Bella's memory. Wullschlager writes of the effect on Chagall: "As news poured in through 1945 of the ongoing Holocaust at Nazi concentration camps, Bella took her place in Chagall's mind with the millions of Jewish victims." He even considered the possibility that their "exile from Europe had sapped her will to live."


title: Marc Chagall

text: After a year of living with his daughter Ida and her husband Michel Gordey, he entered into a romance with Virginia Haggard, daughter of diplomat Sir Godfrey Digby Napier Haggard and great-niece of the author Sir Henry Rider Haggard; their relationship endured seven years. They had a child together, David McNeil, born 22 June 1946. Haggard recalled her "seven years of plenty" with Chagall in her book, "My Life with Chagall" (Robert Hale, 1986).


title: Marc Chagall

text: A few months after the Allies succeeded in liberating Paris from Nazi occupation, with the help of the Allied armies, Chagall published a letter in a Paris weekly, "To the Paris Artists":


title: Marc Chagall

text: By 1946, his artwork was becoming more widely recognized. The Museum of Modern Art in New York had a large exhibition representing 40 years of his work which gave visitors one of the first complete impressions of the changing nature of his art over the years. The war had ended and he began making plans to return to Paris. According to Cogniat, "He found he was even more deeply attached than before, not only to the atmosphere of Paris, but to the city itself, to its houses and its views." Chagall summed up his years living in America:


title: Marc Chagall

text: He went back for good during the autumn of 1947, where he attended the opening of the exhibition of his works at the Musée National d'Art Moderne.


title: Marc Chagall

text: After returning to France he traveled throughout Europe and chose to live in the Côte d'Azur which by that time had become somewhat of an "artistic centre". Matisse lived near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, about seven miles west of Nice, while Picasso lived in Vallauris. Although they lived nearby and sometimes worked together, there was artistic rivalry between them as their work was so distinctly different, and they never became long-term friends. According to Picasso's mistress, Françoise Gilot, Picasso still had a great deal of respect for Chagall, and once told her,


title: Marc Chagall

text: In April 1952, Virginia Haggard left Chagall for the photographer Charles Leirens; she went on to become a professional photographer herself.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall's daughter Ida married art historian Franz Meyer in January 1952, and feeling that her father missed the companionship of a woman in his home, introduced him to Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background, who had run a successful millinery business in London. She became his secretary, and after a few months agreed to stay only if Chagall married her. The marriage took place in July 1952—though six years later, when there was conflict between Ida and Vava, "Marc and Vava divorced and immediately remarried under an agreement more favourable to Vava" (Jean-Paul Crespelle, author of "Chagall, l'Amour le Reve et la Vie", quoted in "Haggard: My Life with Chagall").


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1954, he was engaged as set decorator for Robert Helpmann's production of Rimsky-Korsakov's opera "Le Coq d'Or" at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, but he withdrew. The Australian designer Loudon Sainthill was drafted at short notice in his place.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In the years ahead he was able to produce not just paintings and graphic art, but also numerous sculptures and ceramics, including wall tiles, painted vases, plates and jugs. He also began working in larger-scale formats, producing large murals, stained glass windows, mosaics and tapestries.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1963, Chagall was commissioned to paint the new ceiling for the Paris Opera (Palais Garnier), a majestic 19th-century building and national monument. André Malraux, France's Minister of Culture wanted something unique and decided Chagall would be the ideal artist. However, this choice of artist caused controversy: some objected to having a Russian Jew decorate a French national monument; others disliked the ceiling of the historic building being painted by a modern artist. Some magazines wrote condescending articles about Chagall and Malraux, about which Chagall commented to one writer:


title: Marc Chagall

text: Nonetheless, Chagall continued the project, which took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete. The final canvas was nearly 2,400 square feet (220 sq. meters) and required of paint. It had five sections which were glued to polyester panels and hoisted up to the ceiling. The images Chagall painted on the canvas paid tribute to the composers Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel, as well as to famous actors and dancers.


title: Marc Chagall

text: It was presented to the public on 23 September 1964 in the presence of Malraux and 2,100 invited guests. The Paris correspondent for the "New York Times" wrote, "For once the best seats were in the uppermost circle: Baal-Teshuva writes:


title: Marc Chagall

text: After the new ceiling was unveiled, "even the bitterest opponents of the commission seemed to fall silent", writes Baal-Teshuva. "Unanimously, the press declared Chagall's new work to be a great contribution to French culture." Malraux later said, "What other living artist could have painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera in the way Chagall did?... He is above all one of the great colourists of our time... many of his canvases and the Opera ceiling represent sublime images that rank among the finest poetry of our time, just as Titian produced the finest poetry of his day." In Chagall's speech to the audience he explained the meaning of the work:


title: Marc Chagall

text: According to Cogniat, in all Chagall's work during all stages of his life, it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention. During his earlier years his range was limited by his emphasis on form and his pictures never gave the impression of painted drawings. He adds, "The colors are a living, integral part of the picture and are never passively flat, or banal like an afterthought. They sculpt and animate the volume of the shapes... they indulge in flights of fancy and invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones... His colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes and rhythms."


title: Marc Chagall

text: He was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors. Cogniat writes, "Chagall is unrivalled in this ability to give a vivid impression of explosive movement with the simplest use of colors..." Throughout his life his colors created a "vibrant atmosphere" which was based on "his own personal vision."


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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 Belarus that would sustain his art for more than 70 years.


title: Marc Chagall

text: According to Cogniat, there are certain elements in his art that have remained permanent and seen throughout his career. One of those was his choice of subjects and the way they were portrayed. "The most obviously constant element is his gift for happiness and his instinctive compassion, which even in the most serious subjects prevents him from dramatization..." Musicians have been a constant during all stages of his work. After he first got married, "lovers have sought each other, embraced, caressed, floated through the air, met in wreaths of flowers, stretched, and swooped like the melodious passage of their vivid day-dreams. Acrobats contort themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the end of their stems; flowers and foliage abound everywhere." Wullschlager explains the sources for these images:


title: Marc Chagall

text: His early pictures were often of the town where he was born and raised, Vitebsk. Cogniat notes that they are realistic and give the impression of firsthand experience by capturing a moment in time with action, often with a dramatic image. During his later years, as for instance in the "Bible series", subjects were more dramatic. He managed to blend the real with the fantastic, and combined with his use of color the pictures were always at least acceptable if not powerful. He never attempted to present pure reality but always created his atmospheres through fantasy. In all cases Chagall's "most persistent subject is life itself, in its simplicity or its hidden complexity... He presents for our study places, people, and objects from his own life".


title: Marc Chagall

text: After absorbing the techniques of Fauvism and Cubism (under the influence of Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes) Chagall was able to blend these stylistic tendencies with his own folkish style. He gave the grim life of Hasidic Jews the "romantic overtones of a charmed world", notes Goodman. It was by combining the aspects of Modernism with his "unique artistic language", that he was able to catch the attention of critics and collectors throughout Europe. Generally, it was his boyhood of living in a Belarusian provincial town that gave him a continual source of imaginative stimuli. Chagall would become one of many Jewish émigrés who later became noted artists, all of them similarly having once been part of "Russia's most numerous and creative minorities", notes Goodman.


title: Marc Chagall

text: World War I, which ended in 1918, had displaced nearly a million Jews and destroyed what remained of the provincial shtetl culture that had defined life for most Eastern European Jews for centuries. Goodman notes, "The fading of traditional Jewish society left artists like Chagall with powerful memories that could no longer be fed by a tangible reality. Instead, that culture became an emotional and intellectual source that existed solely in memory and the imagination... So rich had the experience been, it sustained him for the rest of his life." Sweeney adds that "if you ask Chagall to explain his paintings, he would reply, 'I don't understand them at all. They are not literature. They are only pictorial arrangements of images that obsess me..."


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1948, after returning to France from the U.S. after the war, he saw for himself the destruction that the war had brought to Europe and the Jewish populations. In 1951, as part of a memorial book dedicated to eighty-four Jewish artists who were killed by the Nazis in France, he wrote a poem entitled "For the Slaughtered Artists: 1950", which inspired paintings such as the "Song of David" (see photo):


title: Marc Chagall

text: Lewis writes that Chagall "remains the most important visual artist to have borne witness to the world of East European Jewry... and inadvertently became the public witness of a now vanished civilization." Although Judaism has religious inhibitions about pictorial art of many religious subjects, Chagall managed to use his fantasy images as a form of visual metaphor combined with folk imagery. His "Fiddler on the Roof", for example, combines a folksy village setting with a fiddler as a way to show the Jewish love of music as important to the Jewish spirit.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Music played an important role in shaping the subjects of his work. While he later came to love the music of Bach and Mozart, during his youth he was mostly influenced by the music within the Hasidic community where he was raised. Art historian Franz Meyer points out that one of the main reasons for the unconventional nature of his work is related to the hassidism which inspired the world of his childhood and youth and had actually impressed itself on most Eastern European Jews since the 18th century. He writes, "For Chagall this is one of the deepest sources, not of inspiration, but of a certain spiritual attitude... the hassidic spirit is still the basis and source of nourishment of his art." In a talk that Chagall gave in 1963 while visiting America, he discussed some of those impressions.


title: Marc Chagall

text: However, Chagall had a complex relationship with Judaism. On the one hand, he credited his Russian Jewish cultural background as being crucial to his artistic imagination. But however ambivalent he was about his religion, he could not avoid drawing upon his Jewish past for artistic material. As an adult, he was not a practicing Jew, but through his paintings and stained glass, he continually tried to suggest a more "universal message", using both Jewish and Christian themes.


title: Marc Chagall

text: He was also at pains to distance his work from a single Jewish focus. At the opening of The Chagall Museum in Nice he said 'My painting represents not the dream of one people but of all humanity'.


title: Marc Chagall

text: One of Chagall's major contributions to art has been his work with stained glass. This medium allowed him further to 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 viewer stood to the weather outside would alter the visual effect (though this is not the case with his Hadassah windows). 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 Metz Cathedral.


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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 illuminate 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 installed permanently in Jerusalem in February 1962. Each of the twelve windows is approximately 11 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.


title: Marc Chagall

text: French philosopher Gaston Bachelard commented that "Chagall reads the Bible and suddenly the passages become light." In 1973 Israel released a 12-stamp set with images of the stained-glass windows.


title: Marc Chagall

text: The windows symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel who were blessed by Jacob and Moses in the verses which conclude Genesis and Deuteronomy. In those books, notes Leymarie, "The dying Moses repeated Jacob's solemn act and, in a somewhat different order, also blessed the twelve tribes of Israel who were about to enter the land of Canaan... In the synagogue, where the windows are distributed in the same way, the tribes form a symbolic guard of honor around the tabernacle." Leymarie describes the physical and spiritual significance of the windows:


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1964 Chagall created a stained-glass window, entitled "Peace", for the UN in honor of Dag Hammarskjöld, the UN's second secretary general who was killed in an airplane crash in Africa in 1961. The window is about wide and high and contains symbols of peace and love along with musical symbols. In 1967 he dedicated a stained-glass window to John D. Rockefeller in the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York.


title: Marc Chagall

text: The Fraumünster church in Zurich, Switzerland, founded in 853, is known for its five large stained glass windows created by Chagall in 1967. Each window is tall by wide. Religion historian James H. Charlesworth notes that it is "surprising how Christian symbols are featured in the works of an artist who comes from a strict and Orthodox Jewish background." He surmises that Chagall, as a result of his Russian background, often used Russian icons in his paintings, with their interpretations of Christian symbols. He explains that his chosen themes were usually derived from biblical stories, and frequently portrayed the "obedience and suffering of God's chosen people." One of the panels depicts Moses receiving the Torah, with rays of light from his head. At the top of another panel is a depiction of Jesus' crucifixion.


title: Marc Chagall

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


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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 corresponded with Chagall during 1973, and succeeded in persuading the "master of colour and the biblical message" to create 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 created the first window and eight more followed. Chagall's collaborator Charles Marq complemented Chagall's work by adding several stained glass windows using the typical colors of Chagall.


title: Marc Chagall

text: All Saints' Church, Tudeley is the only church in the world to have all its twelve windows decorated by Chagall. The other three religious buildings with complete sets of Chagall windows are the Hadassah Medical Center synagogue, the Chapel of Le Saillant, Limousin, and the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, New York.


title: Marc Chagall

text: The windows at Tudeley were commissioned by Sir Henry and Lady Rosemary d'Avigdor-Goldsmid as a memorial tribute to their daughter Sarah, who died in 1963 aged 21 in a sailing accident off Rye. When Chagall arrived for the dedication of the east window in 1967, and saw the church for the first time, he exclaimed "" ("It's beautiful! I will do them all!") Over the next ten years Chagall designed the remaining eleven windows, made again in collaboration with the glassworker Charles Marq in his workshop at Reims in northern France. The last windows were installed in 1985, just before Chagall's death.


title: Marc Chagall

text: On the north side of Chichester Cathedral there is a stained glass window designed and created by Chagall at the age of 90. The window, his last commissioned work, was inspired by Psalm 150; 'Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord' at the suggestion of Dean Walter Hussey. The window was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in 1978.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall visited Chicago in the early 1970s to install his mural "The Four Seasons", and at that time was inspired to create a set of stained glass windows for the Art Institute of Chicago. After discussions with the Art Institute and further reflection, Chagall made the windows a tribute to the American Bicentennial, and in particular the commitment of the United States to cultural and religious freedom. The windows appeared prominently in the 1986 movie "Ferris Bueller's Day Off". From 2005 to 2010, the windows were moved due to nearby construction on a new wing of the Art Institute, and for archival cleaning.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall first worked on stage designs in 1914 while living in Russia, under the inspiration of the theatrical designer and artist Léon Bakst. 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." These changes appealed to Chagall who had been experimenting with Cubism and wanted a way to enliven his images. Designing murals and stage designs, Chagall's "dreams sprang to life and became an actual movement."


title: Marc Chagall

text: As a result, Chagall played an important role in Russian artistic life during that time and "was one of the most important forces in the current urge towards anti-realism" which helped the new Russia invent "astonishing" creations. Many of his designs were done for the Jewish Theatre in Moscow which put on numerous Jewish plays by playwrights such as Gogol and Singe. Chagall's set designs helped create illusory atmospheres which became the essence of the theatrical performances.


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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". His first assignment designing sets after Russia was for the ballet "Aleko" in 1942, while living in America. In 1945 he was also commissioned to design the sets and costumes for Stravinsky's "Firebird". These designs contributed greatly towards his enhanced reputation in America as a major artist and, as of 2013, are still in use by New York City Ballet.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Cogniat describes how Chagall's designs "immerse the spectator in a luminous, colored fairy-land where forms are mistily defined and the spaces themselves seem animated with whirlwinds or explosions." His technique of using theatrical color in this way reached its peak when Chagall returned to Paris and designed the sets for Ravel's "Daphnis and Chloë" in 1958.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1964 he repainted the ceiling of the Paris Opera using of canvas. He painted two monumental murals which hang on opposite sides of the new Metropolitan Opera house at Lincoln Center in New York which opened in 1966. The pieces, "The Sources of Music" and "The Triumph of Music", which hang from the top-most balcony level and extend down to the Grand Tier lobby level, were completed in France and shipped to New York, and are covered by a system of panels during the hours in which the opera house receives direct sunlight to prevent fading. He also designed the sets and costumes for a new production of "Die Zauberflöte" for the company which opened in February 1967 and was used through the 1981/1982 season.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall also designed tapestries which were woven under the direction of Yvette Cauquil-Prince, who also collaborated with Picasso. These tapestries are much rarer than his paintings, with only 40 of them ever reaching the commercial market. Chagall designed three tapestries for the state hall of the Knesset in Israel, along with 12-floor mosaics and a wall mosaic.


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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 complement to his painting.


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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."


title: Marc Chagall

text: Author Serena Davies writes that "By the time he died in France in 1985—the last surviving master of European modernism, outliving Joan Miró by two years—he had experienced at first hand the high hopes and crushing disappointments of the Russian revolution, and had witnessed the end of the Pale of Settlement, the near annihilation of European Jewry, and the obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a population of 240,000 survived the Second World War."


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall's final work was a commissioned piece of art for the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. The maquette painting titled "Job" had been completed, but Chagall died just before the completion of the tapestry.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Yvette Cauquil-Prince was weaving the tapestry under Chagall's supervision and was the last person to work with Chagall. She left Vava and Marc Chagall's home at 4 pm on 28 March after discussing and matching the final colors from the maquette painting for the tapestry. He died that evening.


title: Marc Chagall

text: His relationship with his Jewish identity was "unresolved and tragic", Davies states. He would have died without Jewish rites, had not a Jewish stranger stepped forward and said the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, over his coffin. Chagall is buried alongside his last wife Valentina "Vava" Brodsky Chagall, in the multi-denominational cemetery in the traditional artists' town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the French region of Provence.


title: Marc Chagall

text: Chagall biographer Jackie Wullschlager praises him as a "pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters... [who] invented a visual language that recorded the thrill and terror of the twentieth century." She adds:


title: Marc Chagall

text: Art historians Ingo Walther and Rainer Metzger refer to Chagall as a "poet, dreamer, and exotic apparition." They add that throughout his long life the "role of outsider and artistic eccentric" came naturally to him, as he seemed to be a kind of intermediary between worlds: "as a Jew with a lordly disdain for the ancient ban on image-making; as a Russian who went beyond the realm of familiar self-sufficiency; or the son of poor parents, growing up in a large and needy family." Yet he went on to establish himself in the sophisticated world of "elegant artistic salons."


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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". Leymarie writes that Chagall "transcended the limits of his century. He has unveiled possibilities unsuspected by an art that had lost touch with the Bible, and in doing so he has achieved a wholly new synthesis of Jewish culture long ignored by painting." He adds that although Chagall's art cannot be confined to religion, his "most moving and original contributions, what he called 'his message,' are those drawn from religious or, more precisely, Biblical sources."


title: Marc Chagall

text: Andre Malraux praised him. He said: "[Chagall] is the greatest image-maker of this century. He has looked at our world with the light of freedom, and seen it with the colours of love."


title: Marc Chagall

text: A 1928 Chagall oil painting, "Les Amoureux", measuring 117.3 x 90.5 cm, depicting Bella Rosenfeld, the artist's first wife and adopted home Paris, sold for $28.5 million (with fees) at Sotheby's New York, 14 November 2017, almost doubling Chagall's 27-year-old $14.85 million auction record.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In October 2010, his painting "Bestiaire et Musique", depicting a bride and a fiddler floating in a night sky amid circus performers and animals, "was the star lot" at an auction in Hong Kong. When it sold for $4.1 million, it became the most expensive contemporary Western painting ever sold in Asia.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 2013, previously unknown works by Chagall were discovered in the stash of artworks hidden away by the son of one of Hitler's art dealers, Hildebrand Gurlitt.


title: Marc Chagall

text: In the 1990s, Daniel Jamieson wrote "The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk", a play concerning the life of Chagall and partner Bella. It has been revived multiple times, most recently in 2020 with Emma Rice directing a production which was live-streamed from the Bristol Old Vic and then made available for on-demand viewing, in partnership with theaters around the world. This production had Marc Antolin in the role of Chagall and Audrey Brisson playing Bella Chagall; produced during the COVID epidemic, it required the entire crew to quarantine together to make the live performance and broadcast possible.


title: Marc Chagall

text: "Chagall", a short 1963 documentary, features Chagall. It won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Short Subject Documentary.


title: Marc Chagall

text: 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". In 1969, Israel produced a stamp depicting his "King David" painting. 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".


title: Marc Chagall

text: In 1987, as a tribute to recognize the centennial of his birth in Belarus, seven nations engaged in a special omnibus program and released postage 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.


title: Marc Chagall

text: There were also several major exhibitions of Chagall's work during his lifetime and following his death.


title: Marc Chagall

text: During the closing ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, a Chagall-like float with clouds and dancers passed by upside down hovering above 130 costumed dancers, 40 stilt-walkers and a violinist playing folk music.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a 2021 biographical comedy-drama film directed by Will Sharpe, from a story by Simon Stephenson, and screenplay by Stephenson and Sharpe. The film stars Benedict Cumberbatch (as the eccentric artist Louis Wain), Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough and Toby Jones.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: "The Electrical Life of Louis Wain" had its world premiere at the 48th Telluride Film Festival on 2 September 2021, had a limited release on 22 October 2021, and was released in the United States on Prime Video on 5 November 2021. It was released in the United Kingdom on 1 January 2022, by StudioCanal.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: In 1881, 18 months after his father's death, Louis Wain, the only male and eldest of the Wain family, becomes the primary breadwinner. He supports five sisters and his mother working part-time as an illustrator for "The Illustrated London News" under editor Sir William Ingram. Ingram offers him a full-time job, but Wain declines in order to try his hand at composing music and playwriting; which he hopes will support the family but neither venture is successful.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: Louis hires Emily Richardson to be the new governess for his sisters. The two become instantly attracted to each other, much to the dismay of the eldest sister, Caroline. Louis decides to take the full time position in order to keep Emily as the governess. One night, Louis takes the family, and Emily to the theatre to see "The Tempest" as an educational trip. She comforts Louis in the men's restroom after he has a recurring nightmare about drowning during the performance, but inadvertently causes a scandal when nosy neighbor Mrs. DuFrane tells people about the incident. Embarrassed, Caroline fires her that night. Before she can leave, Louis professes his love for her and they begin a courtship.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: In 1884, the couple marry, which causes another scandal for the Wain family due to her being 10 years older than him; and her social status as a governess which is considered lower class. They move into a house in Hampstead, where Louis takes additional work as a freelance artist to continue supporting his mother and sisters. Months later, Emily is diagnosed with breast cancer. While walking in the countryside, they take in a stray kitten they name Peter, to relieve the grief of Emily's cancer. The practice of keeping a cat as a pet was unusual in the Victorian era. Louis begins painting realistic pictures of Peter, but the paintings become more unusual as Emily's condition worsens. He makes the cats more anthropomorphic, with them engaging in human behaviour.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: A financial crisis in England causes the paper to cut staff. Sir William tells Louis that he will have cut his workload, and advises him to use the extra time to spend with Emily. After showing Emily his work, she encourages him to show them to Sir William who uses the drawings in two pages of the Christmas edition. Although the edition becomes a success, Emily dies months later. Louis begins drawing more cat pictures to cope with losing the love of his life, creating whole cat societies, but it also begins to show Wain's detachment from reality.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: By 1891, Wain's cat pictures become enormously popular. They are featured on postcards, greeting cards, and other print materials. Wain also sends some of his drawings abroad. The drawings change peoples' perception of cats, making them acceptable as house pets. He hosts cat-themed events and is made chairman of The National Cat Society. Despite the popularity of his work, the family remains in debt. Wain fails to copyright his work, so he cannot profit from any reproductions of the art. To make matters worse, Marie, the youngest, begins to show signs of mental illness. The debt causes the family to be evicted from the Hampstead home.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: Sir William allows the family to stay at one of his properties at a reduced rate. Marie is admitted to an asylum, and Peter dies, causing Wain's own mental health to deteriorate. In 1907, Wain travels to New York, on a trip sponsored by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Wain hopes to forge a successful career in America to alleviate his debts. He meets Max Kase, who tells him that people love the pictures. Days after arriving, he receives news that his mother has died of influenza. He has some success in NYC, but returns to England in 1914 at Caroline's request.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: Upon arriving home, Louis is given the news that Marie, too, has died from influenza. Sir William also dies, succumbing to his gout. The family is evicted, and moves into a smaller flat in London. Louis continues to work as Britain enters World War I. He hits his head trying to jump off a double decker bus, and falls into coma; where he sees a vision of 1999. Coming out of the coma, he is inspired to design futuristic themed cat toys. The toys are manufactured, which looks to change the Wains' fortunes, but their hopes are dashed when a German U-Boat sinks the ship carrying the toys.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: In 1917, Caroline dies. The losses of Emily, his mother, Marie, Peter, Sir William and Caroline causes Louis to go on a series of violent mental breakdowns. In 1924, his sisters are forced to have him committed to the Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting. Dan Rider, an official inspecting the mental institution recognizes Louis; in 1881 Louis drew his dog Cleopatra for free while they rode a train. After speaking with Louis, he starts a campaign, along with Wain's three remaining sisters (who never married) to raise money that will place Louis in a better facility that allows cats and provides patients access to outdoors.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: The campaign gets an enormous response, as thousands of admirers of Wain's art contribute. The author H.G. Wells, also a fan of Louis's work, along with other prominent British figures, assist with the effort. After raising the money needed. Louis is transferred to Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark, where he has a cat companion. In 1930, he is admitted Napsbury Hospital in St. Albans.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: Guided by Emily's spirit, and with his journal and a cut-out piece of Emily's old scarf, Louis goes out to the painted countryside, where Emily once told him that he would find her there.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: Simon Stephenson's original script was selected for the Britlist of the UK's hottest unproduced scripts in 2014.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: The film was announced in July 2019, with Benedict Cumberbatch, Claire Foy, Andrea Riseborough and Toby Jones cast. Will Sharpe would co-write and direct, with filming beginning on August 10 in London. In August 2019, Aimee Lou Wood, Hayley Squires, Stacy Martin, Julian Barratt, Sharon Rooney, Adeel Akhtar and Asim Chaudhry joined the cast of the film.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: In September 2019, production visited the Kent coast to film various scenes. The exterior and conservatory of The Coast House B&B in Deal doubled as Bendigo Lodge, the home that Louis and his sisters take by the seaside. Botany Bay and Kingsgate Bay in Broadstairs also feature in the film, as well as Deal and Kingsdown seafront.


title: The Electrical Life of Louis Wain

text: The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on 2 September 2021, followed by a screening at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival that same month. It began its limited release on 22 October 2021. It was released on Prime Video on 5 November 2021.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The Kobayashi Maru is a training exercise in the "Star Trek" franchise designed to test the character of Starfleet Academy cadets in a no-win scenario. The "Kobayashi Maru" test was first depicted in the 1982 film "", and it has since been referred to and depicted in numerous other "Star Trek" media.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The notional goal of the exercise is to rescue the civilian spaceship "Kobayashi Maru", which is damaged and stranded in dangerous territory. The cadet being evaluated must decide whether to attempt to rescue the "Kobayashi Maru"—endangering their ship and crew—or leave the "Kobayashi Maru" to certain destruction. If the cadet chooses to attempt a rescue, an insurmountable enemy force attacks their vessel. By reprogramming the test itself, James T. Kirk became the only cadet to defeat the "Kobayashi Maru".


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The phrase ""Kobayashi Maru"" has entered the popular lexicon as a reference to a no-win scenario. The term is also sometimes used to invoke Kirk's decision to "change the conditions of the test."


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The test is introduced in the opening of "", with Lieutenant Saavik commanding her crew on a bridge simulator. They receive a distress call from the "Kobayashi Maru" and enter the Klingon Neutral Zone to rescue it"." The crew loses contact with the civilian ship and three Klingon vessels attack. With the bridge crew dead and the ship badly damaged, Saavik orders the crew to abandon ship and the simulation ends. When Saavik says the test is unfair because there is no way to win, Admiral James T. Kirk replies that a starship captain might face an actual "no-win scenario". Later in the film, Kirk reveals that he beat the "Kobayashi Maru" as a cadet on his third attempt by reprogramming the simulation to make it possible to rescue the ship, and that he does not actually believe in the idea of a no-win scenario. The 2009 film "Star Trek" shows an alternate timeline's version of Cadet Kirk defeating the "Kobayashi Maru" test.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The test is also depicted in the "" episode "Kobayashi" (2022). Dal, who is struggling as the starship "Protostar"'s captain and is not familiar with Starfleet's test, repeats the simulation many times. Every attempt ends in his ship's destruction, adding to his despondence. A holographic version of Spock advises Dal that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few," and Dal realizes he needs to listen to his crew more often.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The "Kobayashi Maru" is referred to in other live-action and animated content, and characters also use the phrase ""Kobayashi Maru"" to describe no-win or desperate situations generally. The fourth-season premiere of "" is titled "Kobayashi Maru" (2021) and depicts the main characters confronting several challenging situations. Licensed media provide additional depictions of and references to the test, and two "Star Trek" novels carry the test's name in their title: "The Kobayashi Maru" (1989) by Julia Ecklar and "Kobayashi Maru" (2008) by Michael A. Martin and Andy Mangels.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: "Star Trek II" screenwriter Jack B. Sowards developed the "Kobayashi Maru", naming it after his former neighbors. Kirk's rejection of "the no-win scenario" in the film is one of several characterizations that reflected Sowards' own mindset at the time. Anticipating that news would leak of Spock's death at the film's end, Sowards had Spock and other known "Enterprise" bridge officers feign their deaths as part of the opening "Kobayashi Maru" simulation; Kirk's quip afterward to Spock—"Aren't you dead?"—was Sowards' way of playing on that knowledge with the audience.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The "all-star crew" of Spock, Uhura, Sulu, and McCoy on the bridge simulator in "Star Trek II" motivated "Star Trek: Prodigy"'s producers to attempt to create a "perfect" bridge crew for a holodeck in their show. The writers could not reach consensus, and their lineup was limited by the availability of appropriate audio. Aaron Waltke, who wrote the episode, believed strongly that the characters should be voiced by the original actors, which meant finding either archived audio or recording new dialogue. Waltke did most of the research to find appropriate audio, which involved reading 90 scripts and watching 40 episodes from across the franchise; he called it "one of the hardest writing experiences I've ever had." The protagonist Dal's (voiced by Brett Gray) holographic bridge crew ultimately consisted of Spock, Uhura, Scotty, and Odo, and they were "voiced" by mixing archival television and film dialogue of the characters as depicted by Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, and René Auberjonois, respectively. Beverly Crusher was added when the writers realized someone needed to interact more directly with Dal, and Gates McFadden recorded new dialogue for the character.


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: "Entertainment Weekly" said the "Kobayashi Maru" test is one of the top ten elements of "Star Trek" with which non-fans are likely to be familiar; writing for Tor, Keith DeCandido said "everyone knows that the "Kobayashi Maru" refers to a no-win scenario". Craig S. Semon said that if the 2009 "Star Trek" film were popular with both general audiences and serious "Star Trek" fans, then director J. J. Abrams will have outperformed Kirk on the "Kobayashi Maru". "io9" called "Prodigy"'s "Kobayashi Maru" and its impact on Dal "surprisingly touching".


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, "Star Trek" fan Randy Pausch received an autographed picture of Kirk whose inscription from William Shatner echoed Kirk's dialogue in "Star Trek II:" "I don't believe in the no-win scenario."


title: Kobayashi Maru

text: The term has been applied to real-world scenarios with no perceived positive outcome or that requires out-of-the-box thinking, such as climate change, constitutional law, education, and the casting of the Ancient One character in "Doctor Strange". Commentators have used Kirk's unorthodox answer to the "Kobayashi Maru" test as an example of the need to redefine the premises upon which an organization operates—changing the rules rather than playing within them. Computer security educators have used the "Kobayashi Maru" to teach students to think like an adversary, and that by stepping outside the rules of the game one can redefine the game. Ideas and products focusing on immersive learning have also been compared to the realistic, immersive nature of the "Kobayashi Maru" test.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Need for Speed is a 2014 action thriller film directed and co-edited by Scott Waugh and written by George and John Gatins. It is the film adaptation of the racing video game franchise of the same name by Electronic Arts. The film stars Aaron Paul, Dominic Cooper, Scott Mescudi in his feature film debut, Imogen Poots, Ramón Rodríguez, and Michael Keaton. It tells the story of street racer Tobey Marshall, who sets off to race cross-country as a way of avenging his friend's death at the hands of a rival racer, Dino Brewster.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: "Need for Speed" was released by Touchstone Pictures on March 14, 2014, in 3D, IMAX 3D, and conventional theaters. After its release, the film received generally negative reviews, criticized for its direction, nonsensical story, and acting of the supporting cast, though some praise for Paul's acting. The movie grossed $203 million worldwide.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Tobey Marshall is a former race car driver who owns his late father's garage, Marshall Performance Motors, in Mount Kisco, New York, where he and his friends tune performance cars. Struggling to make ends meet, he and his crew participate in street races after hours. After a race, Tobey's former rival Dino Brewster conscripts them into completing the build of a rare Ford Shelby Mustang worked on by the late Carroll Shelby, in exchange for 25% of the car's sales revenue. The completed Mustang is displayed for auction at a party in New York City. Tobey and Dino meet Julia, an English car broker whose client, Bill Ingram, wants to purchase the car if they can prove it will drive over 230 mph, as Tobey claims. Despite Dino's objections, Tobey takes the Mustang to a local race track and successfully drives it at 234 mph, convincing Ingram to purchase it for $2.7 million.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Enraged by Tobey's disobedience to his objections, Dino challenges Tobey and his friend Pete to a race after Pete flatly tells Dino that everyone knows Tobey is a better driver than him. Dino offers to relinquish his entire share of the Mustang sale if Tobey wins, otherwise Tobey will have to forfeit his share. He challenges them to race with his uncle's three Koenigsegg Agera R cars illegally imported from Europe. On the home stretch, realizing he is going to lose, Dino intentionally bumps into Pete's car, sending it down a ravine and killing Pete as it bursts into flames. Dino disappears from the scene, while Tobey is arrested by the police and sentenced to two years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, unable to prove Dino was there.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Upon his release on parole, Tobey sets out to avenge Pete's death. He borrows Ingram's Mustang to enter the De Leon, a winner-takes-all exotic car race organized by the mysterious Monarch, but as a condition, Ingram requires Julia to accompany Tobey while Tobey is driving the Mustang. The pair have 45 hours to reach San Francisco before the race starts. In Detroit, they cause an interstate chase with the Michigan State Police and upload the footage. Dino offers his rare Lamborghini Sesto Elemento to anyone who can stop Tobey entering the race, causing a group of truckers to go after the Mustang as well. Julia retaliates by convincing Monarch of Tobey's innocence, securing his invitation to the De Leon.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: In Utah, Tobey and Julia are ambushed by truckers, forcing them off the road. Benny, a member of Tobey's crew, appears in a military helicopter stolen from the National Guard, and carries the Mustang mid-air to Tobey's crew at the Bonneville Salt Flats, getting himself arrested in the process. Tobey and Julia reach San Francisco's Mark Hopkins Hotel in time to register for the race, but on Nob Hill, a tow truck smashes into the Mustang, wrecking it and injuring Julia. Desperate to get another car for the race, Tobey meets Dino's fiancée Anita, his ex-girlfriend and Pete's sister. Having discovered Dino's involvement in Pete's death, Anita gives Tobey the location of Dino's hidden Koenigsegg, which Tobey and crew member Joe extract. Tobey meets Julia at a San Francisco hospital, confessing his feelings for her with a kiss and letting her know that he has a "fast" car, and that this is for Pete.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: The next morning, Tobey surprises Dino by showing up in the Koenigsegg he had driven when Pete was killed, and giving him Anita's engagement ring, informing Dino that she is through with him. Besides the Koenigsegg and Dino's Lamborghini, the other participating cars and drivers include:


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: In the ensuing race along the Pacific Coast Highway, the racers and pursuing California Highway Patrol officers crash one-by-one, leaving Tobey and Dino racing side-by-side. Dino attempts to ram Tobey the same way he killed Pete, but Tobey dodges, causing Dino to crash and flip over. Tobey pulls Dino from the wreckage before reaching the finish line, but not without punching Dino to avenge Pete; both are subsequently apprehended by the police, with Dino eventually convicted of the murder of Pete.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: 178 days later, Tobey is released, and Julia meets him at the prison gates in a 2015 Ford Mustang. The couple drives to a prison in Utah, where Benny is getting released early for good behavior.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: In July 2012, DreamWorks Studios was committed to a film based on the "Need for Speed" series of video games by Electronic Arts, initially with a release date of February 7, 2014, and later March 14, 2014. Brothers George and John Gatins had written a script that was being shipped to studios by April of that year. Taylor Kitsch was offered the lead role in July 2012, though the role eventually went to Aaron Paul that October. Paul had originally auditioned for the role of Dino Brewster, although director Scott Waugh and DreamWorks head Steven Spielberg decided against that and cast him as the lead. The same month, Imogen Poots was cast as the female lead. In January 2013, Dominic Cooper, Scott Mescudi, Ramón Rodríguez, Rami Malek and Harrison Gilbertson were cast in the film. Michael Keaton was cast in February 2013.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Principal photography began in Macon, Georgia, in mid-April 2013. Other filming locations include Road Atlanta in Braselton, Georgia, on May 12, 2013, the 13th Street Bridge in Columbus, Georgia and Phenix City, Alabama, and Campus Martius in Detroit, Michigan, beginning on June 1, 2013. Other production locations include sections of California's Highway 1 north of Point Arena, California, the Point Arena Lighthouse, and Highway 253 between Boonville, California and Ukiah, California; and also Highway 128, between the town of Navarro and the Navarro Bridge linking Highway 128 North to Highway 1 South to Point Arena, California.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: For the film's chase sequences, the filmmakers decided against the use of computer-generated imagery, instead employing practical effects, which required the cast to receive extensive driving lessons. All of the exotic cars seen in the film (with the exception of the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren 722 Roadster) were kit car replicas.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: On September 25, 2013, a trailer for the film was released on iTunes. Disney and DreamWorks announced the film's post-production conversion to 3D on February 5, 2014. "Need for Speed" held its world premiere at the TCL Chinese Theatre on March 7, 2014. The film was released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures through the Touchstone Pictures banner on March 14, 2014, in selected 3D, IMAX, and conventional 2D theaters. It was also released worldwide by Disney, except for territories in Europe, Africa and Middle East, where the rights are sold by Mister Smith Entertainment to other industries. Reliance Entertainment had released the film in India, while Entertainment One Films released it in the United Kingdom.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: "Need for Speed" was released by Touchstone Home Entertainment on Blu-ray Disc, DVD and 3D Blu-ray on August 5, 2014.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: "Need for Speed" grossed $43.6 million in North America and $159.7 million in other countries, for a worldwide total of $203.3 million.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: In North America, it topped the box office with $6.7 million on its opening Friday, March 14, 2014. However, the film finished in third place over the three-day weekend with $17.8 million. Outside North America, the film debuted in first place with $45.6 million on the same weekend as its North America release. It remained in first place for a second weekend. Overall, the film's largest territory is China, where both the film's opening weekend ($21.1 million) and its total earnings ($66.2 million) are higher than in North America. Following these two territories in total earnings is Russia and the CIS with $13.8 million.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews and an average rating of . The site's critical consensus reads, "With stock characters and a preposterous plot, this noisily diverting video game adaptation fulfills a "Need for Speed" and little else." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 39 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Michael Phillips of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars, remarking that "Paul has talent, though the actor's idea of simmering intensity in the context of "Need for Speed" comes off more like a serial killer in the making. Cooper, by contrast, seems to be having some fun playing a dashing, dastardly, sexy beast." Phillips added, "At its occasional best, the thrills in the film recall the delirious fun of the "Fast & Furious" franchise." Betsy Sharkey of "Los Angeles Times" felt similarly, writing "In trying for the vicarious varoom of the street-racing video game that inspired it, and no doubt dreaming of "Fast" success, "Speed" clocks in at a long two-plus hours and falls painfully short." Jason Torchinsky of the automotive blog Jalopnik decried the movie for insulting gearheads with its far-reaching suspension of disbelief on many plot points and tropes and stated the film was nothing more than a glorified car commercial for the 2015 Ford Mustang.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Danny Korecki of automotive outlet The Drive discussed the thought that the Need for Speed film may have been better had it been a TV series.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: A.O. Scott of "The New York Times" gave a more positive review, praising the film's car chase sequences, while declaring the overall film "an energetic, unpretentious B movie".


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: The film's soundtrack, composed by Nathan Furst, was released by Varèse Sarabande on March 14, 2014. Interscope Records released a separate EP on April 8, 2014, which featured four songs; "Fortunate Son" and "Back in the Saddle" by Aloe Blacc, "All Along the Watchtower" by Jamie N Commons, and "Hero" by Kid Cudi featuring Skylar Grey. Linkin Park's song "Roads Untraveled" from their 2012 album "Living Things" was also featured in the film.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: Score performed by a 77-piece The Angel City Studio Orchestra: 60-piece string orchestra conducted by Tim Davis and 17 musicians on brass section consists 8 French horns, three trumpets, five trombones and one tuba conducted by Suise Benchasil Seiter.


title: Need for Speed (film)

text: In 2015, China Movie Channel and Jiaflix Enterprises teamed up with EA Games to develop a sequel with the film to be set and shot in China. However, as of 2022, no progress has come of the sequel, indicating its possible cancellation.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The Pantsir () missile system is a family of self-propelled, medium-range surface-to-air missile and anti-aircraft artillery systems. Starting with the Pantsir-S1 (, NATO reporting name SA-22 Greyhound) as the first version, it is produced by KBP Instrument Design Bureau of Tula, Russia, and is the successor to the Tunguska M1.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The Pantsir-S1 was designed to provide point air defence of military, industrial and administrative installations against aircraft, helicopters, precision munitions, cruise missiles and UAVs; and to provide additional protection to air defence units against enemy air attacks employing precision munitions, especially at low to extremely low altitudes.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The first finished version was completed in 1995 with the 1L36 radar, later another was designed. It is a short to medium range ground-based air defence system, wheeled, tracked or stationary with two to three operators. Its air defense consists of automatic anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles with radar or optical target-tracking and radio-command guidance.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Its purpose is the protection of civil and military point and area targets, for motorised or mechanised troops up to regimental size or as defensive asset of higher ranking air defence systems like S-300/S-400. The system has capability for anti-munitions missions. It can hit targets on the waterline/above-water. It can operate in a fully automatic mode. It has the ability to work in a completely passive mode. The probability of hitting a target for one missile is not less than 0.7 with a reaction time of 4–6 seconds. It can fire missiles and gun armament while in motion.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: For its main radar station, early detection in height may be between 0–60° or 26–82° depending on the mode. The system is claimed to have significant advantages over other systems, such as Crotale NG (France), Roland-3 (France + Germany), Rapier 2000 (UK), SeaRAM (Germany + USA). This is not confirmed by comparative testing, but clearly follows from the declared limit of possibilities of systems (2010). In 2013, there was a variant with two radar stations for early detection, standing back to back. The system has a modular structure which enables a fast and easy replacement of any part.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: After receiving target coordinates (from any source) it may engage the target (using all the radar except the early detection radar) within a range from −5 to +85 (82) degrees (vertical). The interval between missile launches is 1–1.5 seconds (a world record for analogue systems).


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Originally Soviet strategic missile systems had been placed in fixed, hardened sites. Newer systems such as the S-300PS/PM (SA-10/20) were much more mobile which reduced vulnerabilities to attack. However, once the S-300 unit was found by enemy forces it was still very vulnerable to attack. One of the roles for the Pantsir-S is to provide air defence to the S-300 missile systems.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: It was decided that a wheeled chassis would be better suited for the Pantsir-S rather than a tracked chassis, on grounds that wheeled vehicles are faster, less prone to breakdowns, easier to maintain, and cheaper to produce.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Development as the Pantsir-S started in 1990 as a planned successor to the Tunguska M1. A prototype was completed in 1994 and displayed at the MAKS-1995. The program soon ran into difficulties which resulted in a halt in funding. However, KBP continued development of the program using its own funds. This resulted in a complete re-design of both the turret and radar systems and the removal of any older Tunguska equipment.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The system has two new radars with increased range, capable of tracking more air targets but also land targets. It has an integrated IFF system. Within the cabin two new LCD multi-function displays have replaced the multiple CRT display. A new central computer system greatly decreased the reaction time. Single operator operation can be achieved when needed. Due to the new technologies adopted, the overall volume of the weapon station is reduced by a third while the overall weight is reduced by half. The system has enhanced missiles (from type 57E6 to type 57E6-E probably interchangeable) and guns (from type 2A72 to type 2A38M).


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Live firing tests took place in June 2006 at the Kapustin Yar firing range, Astrakhan Region, Russia. Final test series prior to delivery in May 2007 at Kapustin Yar included a forced march of to an unprepared launch position simulating the accomplishing of a typical air-defence mission.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The Pantsir-S1 air-defence missile-gun system was adopted for service with the Russian Ground Forces in November 2012. The modernized Pantsir-S2 entered service in 2015.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Russia is developing a track-based Pantsir system to be more maneuverable with Russian Ground Forces and Airborne Forces.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: New upgraded variant of the Pantsir-S1 first unveiled in February 2019 as some of the planned models. Experience of the system deployment in Syria was applied during development of the new modification. It has an upgraded L-band search radar with ability to track up to 40 targets at once and new multifunctional EHF fire-control radar that can engage four targets simultaneously, both fitted with phased antenna arrays. The system uses a new 57E6M-E surface-to-air missile with an increased ceiling from , an engagement range from and a speed of . It has a 25 kg fragmentation warhead, compared to the 20 kg warhead of the standard 57E6-E missile. The first export contract was signed in August 2021.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: A naval variant of the land-based Pantsir-S1 was unveiled in July 2015. The system uses two GSh-6-30K/AO-18KD six-barrel rotary cannons, as found on the Kashtan/Kortik CIWS, eight missiles instead 12 and an additional radar separate from the one fitted on top of the turret itself. The Pantsir-M can simultaneously engage four targets with four missiles in an altitude from 2 to 15 km and at a range of 20 km. The system has an ammunition supply of 32 missiles.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: It has several combat modules, including an ammunition supply module in the storage and a reloading system under the deck. It may by fitted with surface-to-air missiles from both Pantsir-S and Hermes-K air defence systems with maximum firing range of the later of up to . In the future it will replace the Kashtan/Kortik CIWS on all Russian Navy's warships, starting by Karakurt-class corvettes in 2018. Trials of the Pantsir-M/ME began in December 2017. The system entered service in February 2019.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: A modernized system for the Russian Armed Forces and for export. Incorporates new tracking radar, two faced radars with enhanced features and range. It is in service with Russia and Algeria.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The Pantsir-SM variant incorporates a multi-functional targeting station, increasing target detection range from and engagement range from . The system uses a new high-speed extended range missile. Existing Pantsir systems can be upgraded to SM standard. It is fitted to a new 8×8 Kamaz truck chassis with an armored cab. Development was completed in 2019.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: After testing Pantsir in the Arctic, it was decided to design a new version specifically for the Arctic, to use at temperatures below called the Pantsir-SA. This version has no 30 mm auto-cannon mounted and it is based on an articulated tracked Vityaz vehicle. It is in service with the Russian Northern Fleet as of August 2020.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The specific feature of the Pantsir-S1 system is the combination of a multiple-band target acquisition and tracking system in conjunction with a combined missile and gun armament creating a continuous target engagement zone from height and range up to height and range, even without any external support.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The Pantsir-S1 carries up to twelve "57E6" (export designation) "57E6-E" (export enhanced designation) two-stage solid fuel radio/optical command-guided surface-to-air missiles in sealed ready-to-launch container tubes. Missiles are arranged into two six-tube groups on the turret. The missile has a bicalibre body, consisting of two stages in a tandem configuration. The first stage is a booster, providing rapid acceleration within the first 2 seconds of flight, after which it is separated from the sustainer-stage.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The sustainer is highly agile and contains the high explosive multiple continuous-rod/fragmentation warhead, as well as the contact and proximity fuses, guidance flare and radio transponder. The missile is not fitted with a seeker to keep target engagement costs low. Target and missile tracking is instead provided via the system's multiband sensor system. Guidance data is submitted via radio link for up to four missiles in flight.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The system is capable of tracking and guiding four missiles fired at four distinct targets. Operationally, however, two missile salvos are typically fired at each target. The 57E6 missile is believed to have a kill probability of 70–90%. They have a 15-year storage lifetime in its sealed launch container. Pantsir-S1 combat vehicles can fire missiles on the move.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Additional missiles, one specifically designed to engage unmanned aerial vehicles, and another one hypersonic, developing speeds of more than Mach 5, have been developed for the Pantsir system.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Two dual 2A38M autocannon guns are fitted with 700 rounds in a variety of ammunition—HE (High Explosive) fragmentation, fragmentation tracer, and armour-piercing with tracer. Ammunition type can be selected by the crew depending on the nature of the target. The maximum rate of fire is 2,500 rounds per minute per gun. Range is up to . The combined gun-missile system has an extremely low altitude engagement capability (targets as low as 0 m AGL can be engaged by this system).


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Wheeled combat vehicles have to be jacked up to keep the machine in the horizontal position and be able to fire the gun with full accuracy. The KAMAZ-6560 has four oil hydraulic jacks for this purpose.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The Pantsir-S1 fire control system includes a target acquisition radar and dual waveband tracking radar (designation 1RS2-1E for export models), which operates in the UHF and EHF waveband. Its detection range is . Its tracking range is for a target with a RCS. Can also reliably achieve more, to . This radar tracks both targets and the surface-to-air missile while in flight. Minimum target size ()


title: Pantsir missile system

text: As well as radar, the fire control system has an electro-optic channel with a long-wave thermal imager and an infrared direction finder, including digital signal processing and automatic target tracking. A simplified, lower-cost version of the Pantsir-S1 is being developed for export, with only the electro-optic fire control system fitted.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: The two independent guidance channels—radar and electro-optic—allow two targets to be engaged simultaneously. And four for more recent options (2012). The maximum engagement rate is up to 10–12 targets per minute.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Types of purposes. Aircraft, UAVs, helicopters, anti-radar missiles (detection range of AGM-88 HARM missile ), air-launched cruise missiles.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: In order to increase high operational readiness KBP has designed several vehicles to support the Pantsir-S1 in the field.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: In June 2019, United Arab Emirates deployed several of its Pantsir-S1 air defence systems to Libya, to support the Libyan National Army (LNA) in their advance towards Tripoli. The Libyan Interior Minister of the Government of National Accord (GNA), Fathi Bashagha claimed one of the systems was reportedly destroyed by a GNA Libyan Air Force strike on 13 November 2019.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: On 15 May 2020, Turkish media showed a Pantsir system belonging to the LNA targeted in a GNA drone strike near the Al-Watiya Air Base, southwest of Tripoli. Reportedly, the system was supplied by the United Arab Emirates. The airstrike came as a part of an operation to cut supplies to the LNA. Turkish media showed imagery of the airstrike. The LNA denied the claim made by the GNA. On 18 May, the Turkish-backed GNA captured the al-Watiya Air Base including a Pantsir-S1 TLAR belonging to the LNA. Later, it was reported that the captured Pantsir battery was the same targeted three days before and it was transferred by the United States to Ramstein Air Base in Germany in June 2020.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: On 20 May 2020, Mohammed Gununu, a GNA spokesman claimed their forces had destroyed 7 Pantsir TLARs in Al-Watiya airbase, Tarhouna and Al-Wishka. Media sources reported the destruction of at least five defenses in the GNA offensive, in turn an LNA official denied the destruction of Pantsirs. On 8 June 2020, video footage was first leaked showing a Pantsir operated by UAE personnel.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Post-conflict analysis showed that Pantsir was (at least temporarily) suppressed by combined efforts from electronic warfare systems on one side and long range artillery (or airstrikes) on the other side. Pantsir's positions were allegedly detected by long-range electronic warfare systems. Electronic warfare systems allegedly were at times able to jam Pantsir's radar and then forwarded the information to drone operators. In situations where jamming was not achieved strikes on Pantsir's positions were carried out with long range artillery. Pantsir operators compensated by switching off the radar and focused on the electro-optical sensors instead of the radar (i.e. thermal imager and infrared direction finder), in order to acquire targets and this reportedly improved both Pantsir's survivability and effectiveness.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: On 22 August 2022, a drone speculated to be China's CH-5 or Ch-4 or "something similar" to a US MQ-9 Reaper UAV was shot down over Libya by a Pantsir.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: A Pantsir-S1 unit of the Syrian Air Defense Force reportedly scored the first combat kill of the type by downing a Turkish Air Force RF-4E carrying out a reconnaissance flight over the Syrian coast near Latakia on 22 June 2012. The system has also been deployed on the territory of Syria by the Russian Armed Forces as part of Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War since 2015.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: A Russian poster displayed at the International Military Technical Forum «ARMY-2017», from March to July 2017, claimed that the Russia's Pantsir-S systems deployed in Syria destroyed 12 flying objects, including the UAVs Heron, Bayraktar, RQ-21A, and also various missiles and an aerostat. At the beginning of October 2017, it was reported that the Pantsir destroyed two MLRS "Grad" missiles launched by ISIL.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: On 27 December 2017, militants fired several missiles from the Bdama inhabited community at Latakia International Airport and the Russian Aerospace Forces deployment site in the Khmeimim Air Base. Two missiles were intercepted by the Pantsir air defense system.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: In the night of 5–6 January 2018, the Khmeimim Air Base was attacked by 13 aircraft-type unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Seven drones were eliminated by the Pantsir air defence systems, six landed at assigned coordinates with the use of electronic warfare hardware.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: On 14 April 2018, American, British, and French forces launched a barrage of 103 air-to-surface and cruise missiles targeting eight sites in Syria. According to Russian officials, twenty-five Pantsir-S1 missiles launched in response destroyed twenty-three incoming missiles, The American Department of Defense stated no allied missiles were shot down.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: A Pantsir-S1 system belonging to the Syrian Air Defense Force was damaged by the Israel Defense Forces during the May 2018 Israel-Syria clashes. Images of the damaged system show it was effectively out of ammunition and the radar was disabled at the time of the strike. According to Chief Designer for Air Defense Systems at KBP Instrument Design Bureau (KBP) Valery Slugin, Israeli intelligence managed to track the position of the system after one of its operators called for re-supply and left his mobile phone in the cabin.


title: Pantsir missile system

text: Russia's Pantsir and Tor-M1 air defense systems shot down 27 rockets the militants had fired at the Khmeimim Air Base on 6 May 2019.