Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887 in Vitebsk, a predominantly Jewish city in the Russian Empire (now Belarus), and became one of the most beloved and distinctive artists of the twentieth century. His art draws on the folk traditions of Hasidic Judaism, the colours of Russian icon painting, and the formal innovations of Cubism, Fauvism, and Surrealism — yet it belongs to no school, obeying its own dreamlike logic in which lovers float above rooftops, fiddlers play on green-faced musicians, and goats fly through violet skies.
I and the Village (1911), painted during his first years in Paris, superimposes a man and a cow in a swirling composition of intersecting circles, with tiny scenes of Russian village life scattered like memories across the canvas. The Birthday (1915) shows Chagall flying across a room to kiss his fiancée Bella, their bodies defying gravity with the joyful ease of love itself. These paintings established the visual vocabulary — floating figures, brilliant colour, village memories — that Chagall would explore for the next seven decades.
Chagall’s career was extraordinarily long and productive. He created stained-glass windows for cathedrals and synagogues around the world, painted the ceiling of the Paris Opéra, and produced major cycles of biblical paintings and lithographs. He died in 1985 at the age of ninety-seven, the last surviving major figure of the School of Paris. His art remains a testament to the power of memory, love, and the poetic imagination.