Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in 1887. He was born into a devoutly Jewish Lithuanian family in Belarus, which was a part of the Russian empire, and throughout his life he lived in Russia, France, and the United States.

In 1907 Chagall went to St. Petersburg, Russia to study painting and drawing, and he relocated in Paris as a teenager, to develop his artistic style. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the modernism movement strove to create forms of art that reflected the newly emerging industrial world, and Chagall experienced modernism’s “golden age” in the City of Lights.

Chagall is considered a pioneer of modernism, as well as a major Jewish artist. His artwork has been associated with a number of different styles, and he created works in a wide range of mediums, including painting, drawing, stained glass, book illustration, stage sets, ceramics, and tapestries. Some of the recurring themes in Chagall’s paintings include village scenes, peasant life, musicians, dancing, and circuses, with romantic and spiritual overtones.

In the late 1950s, Chagall learned the art of creating with stained glass, and he designed a number of windows at different international locations, including the Cathedral of Metz in France and the United Nations building in New York. Chagall’s gorgeous stained-glass windows are enchantingly beautiful, as the medium’s capacity for brilliant color seems perfectly suited for his celestial and religious imagery.

Chagall’s paintings are housed in a variety of locations around the world, including the Musée Marc Chagall in Nice, France, which Chagall helped to design. Throughout his 75-year career, Chagall produced an astonishing 10,000 works, with dozens of notable paintings. Chagall died in France in 1985. After he died, a stranger said the Jewish prayer for the dead (the kaddish) over his coffin. Chagall is remembered as a great pioneer of modern art and one of its most brilliant figurative painters.

Carolyn created a tribute to Chagall with her painting After Chagall. Many people have stated that Carolyn’s art reminds them of Chagall’s work.

Some quotes that Marc Chagall is remembered for include:

Great art picks up where nature ends.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Color is all. When color is right, form is right. Color is everything, color is vibration like music; everything is vibration.

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

by David Jay Brown