Marc Chagall Russian, French, 1887-1985
"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it-a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art"
-Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall (6 July 1887 - 28 March 1985) was a Belarusian-born French artist. An early modernist, Chagall was associated with the École de Paris as well as several major artist styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and prints.
Chagall was born in 1887, into a Jewish family near Vitebsk (today - Belarus but at that time in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire). Before World War I he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin, during which time he created his signature style of modern art, based on his ideas of Eastern Europe and Jewish folklore. His work during this period anticipated the dream-like imagery of the Surrealism movement.
Chagall spent the wartime years in his native Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College. During World War II he escaped occupied France to the United States, where he lived in New York for seven years before returning to France in 1948.
Chagall has been referred to as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century" (Robert Hughes), "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists" (Michael J. Lewis) and "respected as the world's pre-eminent Jewish artist (Jonathan McAloon).
