Marc Chagall was a Jewish painter born in 1887 near Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus, who lived most of his long life in France and died there in 1985, aged 97. He is famous for dreamlike pictures of lovers, fiddlers and animals floating over small Russian villages, and for the ceiling of the Paris Opera, which he painted at 77. Almost everything he painted came back to one small town.
Most people arrive for the floating couples and for the question that comes with them: why do they fly? Chagall never gave one tidy answer, but his life holds several.
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In 1919 Chagall, then arts commissar of Vitebsk, opened a free People's Art School in his hometown. About 120 students, most of them poor and Jewish, joined.
Then a colleague brought in the wrong guest. Kazimir Malevich, the leader of Russian abstraction, arrived in November 1919 at the invitation of the teacher El Lissitzky. Within months he had won over most of the students and set up his own group, UNOVIS, which took over the school. In 1920 Chagall resigned and left for Moscow.
The man who is still called a naive folk artist had studied in Saint Petersburg with Léon Bakst, had taken Cubism apart in Paris, and had run an art school until the leader of Russian abstraction took it from him. The folk-artist label does not survive that résumé.
What You'll Discover
Why his lovers float.
Who named his strangest picture.
What was hidden under a stage.
Why Jesus wears a prayer shawl.
Who asked him to repaint the Opera.
Who the windows were for.