Chagall exhibition shows his art beyond the greetings-card images

Tate Liverpool exhibition, the first major UK show of his work outside London, hopes to prompt re-evaluation of his work

Maev Kennedy
The Guardian, Friday 7 June 2013 16.13 BST

Detail from I and the Village 1911, by Marc Chagall. © ADAGP Paris and DACS, London 2013. Photo © SCALA, Florence. Photograph: Tate

The pink and green world of the Russian artist Marc Chagall, whose sheer popularity with the public almost destroyed his reputation in the 20th century, goes on display on Saturday in the first major exhibition of his work in the UK outside London.

The apparent fairytale happiness of much of his work, a world in which musicians, poets, goats and women can float in bright sky – like kites – sold millions of prints and greeting cards. But as visitors to the exhibition will discover, there is darkness too, not least in the shadows gathering over the traditional Jewish life and culture of his native Vitebsk, in modern Belarus, a rich heritage on which he would draw for the rest of his long life.

The exhibition at Tate Liverpool gathers together more than 70 works from public and private collections across Europe, Russia and the United States – including his last major work before he left Russia for good in 1922, a sequence of monumental wall paintings for a Jewish theatre in Moscow which only survived because admirers hid them for decades after the theatre closed.

His granddaughter Meret Meyer, an adviser on the exhibition, hopes it will prompt a critical re-evaluation of his work. "With the lithographs and prints, which began when he was working in America, suddenly his work was everywhere, but he never wanted to be the 'great big look at me and see no other artist' painter."

"People who think of him as the greeting card artist, the calendar artist of lovers and bouquets are seeing only one side of his work. His work is not about happiness, neither is it about unhappiness, it is much more serious. If you are too happy you just lie there and do nothing, if you are too unhappy you must get therapy but you cannot work. But he worked all the time, he was driven, that's what made him get up in the morning."

The exhibition, which runs until 6 October, tracks his first years in Paris from 1911, when he was terribly homesick but inspired by the artists whose work he saw, and by the poets and authors he sat up half the night conversing with. One painting, titled by a friend Half Past Three, shows a poet and his wine bottle both toppling into the small hours, watched by a cat sticking out its tongue in amusement or contempt.

He returned to Russia and his village in 1914 for a short visit for a family wedding, but was trapped there by the outbreak of war and revolution. Despite marrying his childhood sweetheart, acquiring the grand title of Art Commissar for the village, and founding a people's art school, he became increasingly disillusioned, and managed to leave in 1922 on the pretext of organising an exhibition in Berlin.

The theatre paintings, a whole world of Jewish culture on giant wall panels, were made for the tiny, 90-seat State Jewish Theatre in Moscow. They were found rolled under the stage after the theatre closed and, according to legend, carried rolled up over people's shoulders to the Tretyakov museum. Even there, Meyer said, with the artist and the subject matter officially seen as equally suspect, they would not have been safe, and so they were hidden for decades in the stores under another name.

Assistant curator Stephanie Straine recalled the drama and the anxiety of their arrival from Moscow.

"We couldn't have got the biggest one in the door, so it came rolled on a huge drum, with five conservators to look after it. They set up a table in the middle of the gallery, and then unrolled the canvas on to it, removed the legs and then the table became the stretcher to hang it on the wall. It was an extraordinary moment, there were about 20 of us from the Tate, hardly able to breathe. I couldn't watch. It is just amazing to see it safely on the wall."

Chagall: Modern Master runs at Tate Liverpool until 6 October