Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born in Russia in 1887 to a Jewish family, he moved to France in 1910 and became a prominent figure in the Paris art world. Later he spent time in the United States and the Middle East, these travels and life experiences inspired his artistic creations. Despite an impoverished upbringing in Russia, Chagall filled his canvases with extremely colorful, happy, nostalgia and optimistic references to his birthplace Vitebsk in Russia. The connections between his art and early life form his storehouse of visual images: landscape of his childhood, wooden houses, the livestock, nature and flowers, myths he learnt of when he was small, quirky/ghostly figures floating freely in the sky…. All with an undertone of yearning and intense emotions.

While many of his peers like Picasso and Matisse pursued ambitious experiments that led often to abstraction, Chagall believed in the power of figurative art that he maintained despite absorbing ideas from Fauvism, Surrealism and Cubism. Chagall’s poetic, dreamlike, figurative style outstands him from most of the artists in the Modern Period. Appreciating Chagall’s works always leads the audience to a mind state of slight melancholy sensation but at the same time a reinforcement of inspiration due to the colorful presentation of his works brought to us that delivers a strong sense of positivity and optimism.