Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was a Russian-born French painter born in Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, into a Hasidic Jewish family. He studied at the Imperial Society for the Protection of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg before moving to Paris in 1910, where he encountered Cubism and Fauvism. His early paintings combined the imagery of Russian Jewish life and folklore with lessons from the Parisian avant-garde in a mode that remained singular across his long career.

Chagall returned to Russia after 1914 and was appointed director of the Vitebsk Art School after the revolution, before disputes with Malevich led him to leave for Moscow and then Paris in 1923. He spent the years of the Second World War in the United States, having fled the German Occupation in 1941; several of his relatives died in the Holocaust, and the catastrophe marked his late work profoundly, above all The White Crucifixion (1938) and subsequent paintings in which the suffering of the Jewish people is figured through the image of Christ. He returned to France in 1948 and settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he died at the age of ninety-seven. His late work was monumental in scale and ambition: stained-glass windows for the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem (1962) and for the Metz Cathedral, a ceiling for the Paris Opéra (1964), and a mosaic for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. The Musée national Marc Chagall opened in Nice in 1973.

His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, and major institutions internationally.