America Windows was perfectly designed for its present host, featuring as it does many elements of life in Chicago and the wider US. The artist chose to work within stained glass in order to try a new challenge within his career and particularly appreciated the opportunities that it brought about regarding bright colour. He produced many windows in total, though had to collaborate with specialists in this medium in order to deliver successful artworks. He concentrated on the content, with advice and assistance coming in for the process of turning his designs into finished windows. Many of these techniques take a lifetime to learn and so artists who wanted to try out different mediums such as this would have no choice but to call upon expertise or risk producing sub-standard products as they went about learning each new method. The stained glass approach has proven particularly popular in France and the UK, but remains somewhat of a niche medium because of the difficulty in producing items and then finding suitable places to display them.
The artist would create these artworks from his studio in France and then have them delivered to Chicago upon completion. He signed Reims on the back of them which confirmed this. The content found within these stunning designs included the skyline of Chicago, illustrating how he already was working to a requested theme. There were also elements of modern culture represented one at a time as we scroll through the different windows. You will see for example, music, painting and architecture represented here as the artist seems to have been tasked with producing something that promoted the offerings of the city. The designs spread across ten metres in total and are around a metre in height across the board.
Whilst impressing within the medium of stained glass window design, Chagall remains most famous for his oil paintings. This medium would form the main body of his career and also seemed most suited to his production techiques, where no help from anyone else was required. Some of the highlights that he contributed included the likes of La Mariee, Birthday and Dream, though in total there were hundreds of impressive artworks to enjoy. He created a fairly unique style which sat between a number of different movements, making it hard to categorise him particularly accurately. Most remember him for producing dream-like scenes in which reality and the imagined become combined together in some beautiful and bright modern fusions.
