Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall (1887–1985, Vitebsk, Belarus) was a Russian-French painter, printmaker and designer whose practice across eight decades produced one of the most distinctive and widely recognised bodies of work in twentieth-century art. Drawing on Jewish folk tradition, Russian village life, the Bible and the visual languages of Fauvism and Cubism, Chagall developed a dreamlike, floating imagery of lovers, animals, musicians and religious figures that resisted easy categorisation within the movements of his time.

Arriving in Paris in 1910, Chagall encountered the avant-garde at its most concentrated moment, absorbing the colour of Fauvism and the fragmented space of Cubism while maintaining a deeply personal and narrative approach to painting. Works such as I and the Village (1911) and The Birthday (1915) established the levitating, memory-saturated imagery that would define his practice. His illustrations for Gogol’s Dead Souls (1923–25) and La Fontaine’s Fables (1926–27), commissioned by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, confirmed his standing as one of the great printmakers of the century.

Chagall’s later career encompassed stained glass for Reims Cathedral and the United Nations, ceiling paintings for the Paris Opéra, and a sustained engagement with the Hebrew Bible through the Message Biblique series, now housed in the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice. His work is held in every major collection of modern art internationally.