The famous "Violinist" Chagall written on a tablecloth

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Marc Chagall, a 20th-century French-Russian artist who delighted fans with his colorful, bizarre work, made many of his paintings using the same nine pigments and almost never used black.

He was so poor that his the famous 1912 work “Violinist” - a picture of a violinist dancing on the roof - was painted on a tablecloth. At that time, Chagall was a Jewish immigrant in Paris.

The checkered pattern of the fabric is clearly visible in those parts of the picture where the paint layer is the thinnest.

“He had so little money that he bought canvases at flea markets, wrote on any canvas that he got,” says Meta Schavann, a curator at the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam. “He also used sheets, nightgowns, and even a tablecloth.”

The discoveries were made by researchers who studied a large collection of Chagall’s works in the Amsterdam Museum for five years and spoke about this just before the exhibition of 38 works of Chagall along with other works by Parisian immigrant artists who changed contemporary art, including Picasso and Mondrian.

One of the keepers, Madeleine Bischoff, says that Chagall’s work is characterized by the fact that most of his attention - the contrasting colors that give his work vitality - was concentrated in one or two key areas of the picture with intense details, while the other parts often empty.

Infrared scans showed that these central parts — such as the woman and baby in 1913’s Pregnant Woman — usually remained unchanged when Chagall worked. Details on the edges, such as cows, houses and faces, underwent a lot of changes and improvements in the process of working on the picture.

Born in 1887 in a village in present-day Belarus, Chagall left for Paris in 1910, survived World War I in Russia, returned to Paris, and then fled from World War II to New York in the 1940s. After which he nevertheless returned to France again and worked there until his death in 1985.

Throughout his long career, he kept up with the Impressionists, Cubists, Suprematists, Surrealists and many other schools, but retained his own bizarre style. His paintings, often described as fabulous, contained recurring themes. For example, he often painted his wife, memories from his childhood, such as cows, donkeys and milkmaids, as well as scenes of Jewish life.

Until now, his work has not been subjected to such detailed studies as the work of more famous artists of the 20th century.