Press release

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) numbers among the 20th century’s best-known artists, and his one-of-a-kind oeuvre encompasses works created as early as 1905 and as late as the 1980s. Born to an Orthodox Hasidic Jewish working-class family and raised in the small Belarusian town of Vitebsk, the artist experienced early childhood in ways that would influence him his entire life long.

Chagall’s whimsical and poetic pictorial worlds, as familiar to us as they may be, continue to fascinate and present ever-new riddles. His oeuvre oscillates between the traditional and the avant-garde with respect to both style and substance. Based on his experience of 20th-century art’s development from primitivism to cubism, fauvism, and surrealism, Chagall created his very own visual language—one unmistakable feature of which is the essential continuity inherent in his multifaceted artistic expression.