Biography of Marc Chagall
The dreamy jewel-like scenes of renowned modernist Marc Chagall emanate their own inner light like stained glass on a bright day. Showing embracing couples, musicians and circus people, landscapes and cityscapes, Chagall blended influences of fauvism and cubism in his delicately colored canvases and prints. Indeed, Pablo Picasso once noted that “When Matisse dies Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is”. Emotional association as well as a keen pictorial intelligence are key to the artist’s soft, light-filled works which often draw on his early Russian and Jewish heritage for inspiration.
Born in 1887 in present day Belarus, Marc Chagall spent his formative years in Paris in the 1910s before moving back to Russia in 1914. On returning to France in 1923 he formed a business relationship with Ambroise Vollard, one of the most significant French art dealers of the first half of the twentieth century who mentored the likes of Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. Chagall went on to become one of the most famous exponents of modern art, passing away at the age of 97 in 1985. His groundbreaking work has been exhibited at the most prestigious museums in the world including the Louvre, the Grand Palais, Paris, and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm, as well as gracing the halls of the Opera de Paris, Notre-Dame de Reims, and the Metropolitan Opera House.
