Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was a Russian-born French artist of Jewish descent, born near Vitebsk in present-day Belarus, and one of the defining figures of early modernism associated with the School of Paris. His paintings fused elements of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism with the folklore and imagery of his Jewish Eastern European childhood, producing dreamlike compositions of floating figures, fiddlers, and village scenes that the critic Robert Hughes called the work of the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century. Beyond painting, Chagall worked across an unusually wide range of media, including stained glass windows for Jerusalem, the United Nations, and the Fraumunster in Zurich, ceiling paintings for the Paris Opera, and illustrated editions of the Bible, sustaining a distinctive visual language across all of them.