Marc Chagall's only visit to the Soviet Union in 1973 and his Tretyakov Gallery exhibition

In 1973, the 86-year-old Marc Chagall visited the Soviet Union for the first time. The visit was arranged by the Minister of Culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, who had been introduced to the artist in Paris. At the Tretyakov Gallery there opened what contemporaries described as a modest exhibition of lithographs and paintings drawn from the gallery's reserves. In those years he wrote with regret that his pictures had found their way into every museum in the world but not into Russia. The master presented the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov with about a hundred sheets of graphic work. Chagall speaks of his longing for the Motherland in letters to old acquaintances, writes of it in essays, and recounts it in interviews. In the 1930s he wrote to his teacher Yuda Pen, and later to Pavel Ettinger, that he considered himself a Russian artist and was proud of it, that he loved his native country tenderly, and so on. Unfortunately, this was Marc Chagall's only visit to Russia. In the year of his centenary his widow Valentina Brodskaya would open a far larger Chagall exhibition, to which many of his paintings came from his personal collection, from museums and from private holdings. At the end of the 1980s the journal Teatr would publish extracts from Chagall's book My Life, in which he speaks at length, and piercingly, of his native Russia.
There is a legend that Furtseva asked Chagall why he had left the USSR, and he replied: there were not enough colours. When the minister objected that Soviet artists suffered no shortage of colours, Chagall answered: they make do with red alone.