Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk in 1887, a small town in what is now Belarus, into a religious Jewish family of eight children, and this had a lasting influence on his style. This element will influence his style for a long time. Indeed, we find in his painting all the features of the Jewish tradition and Russian folklore. Moreover, his mother played an important role in the young Chagall's life and it is in this context that he became interested in painting.
Before going to Paris, he attended several academies in the center of St. Petersburg. It was at this time that he discovered the works of the avant-garde and that the French capital became a goal to be reached, an inescapable destination to embrace all these works of modernity. Paris had a strong influence on the painter and his painting. He made a habit of visiting the Louvre and frequented the Russian-speaking population as well as the intellectuals of the capital; his painting became clearer and was strongly inspired by the Cubist and Fauvist avant-gardes. In 1914, he returned home to Russia and became, following the October Revolution, responsible for the Fine Arts in the city of Vitebsk.
After a few ups and downs in his native country, due to the change of regime, Chagall made a trip to Berlin before going to Paris. It was during this trip that he met Ambroise Vollard; this meeting brought novelty to his work, and he notably took on several biblical subjects. For fear of the rise of anti-Semitism and the imminence of war, Chagall obtained French nationality in 1937 thanks to Jean Paulhan, a French writer and literary critic. This precious acquisition protected him for a time from persecution, Marc Chagall having been classified as a "degenerate" artist by the Nazi authorities. However, when war broke out, despite these precautions, he still had to flee to the free zone and in 1941 he managed to leave France for the United States with his daughter and some of the works in his studio. There, on the other side of the Atlantic, he met up with his unfortunate comrades such as Mondrian, Breton, Masson and Léger, who had also managed to flee the German oppression.
During this American period, Chagall reconnected with Russia through the American landscapes that reminded him of his childhood. He spoke Yiddish again and surrounded himself with Russian friends sent by the Soviet Union to New York. His art during this period remained marked by anguish, war and fear. Having affected Chagall for a long time, his painting is irremediably impregnated.
In 1948, he was able to return to France. He bought a house in Vence in the South of France and settled there with his new wife Valentina Brodsky. This was an opportunity for the artist to practice new activities, particularly ceramics and stained glass. Marc Chagall worked on various projects, notably for the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce in Assy and for the decoration of the chapels of the Calvary in Vence. We can also mention another major project, widely criticized, and which was entrusted to him by André Malraux himself: the decoration of the ceiling of the Opera Garnier in Paris in 1964.
Marc Chagall's art is, however, quite difficult to define and explain, as it does not belong to any particular movement of his time. It is characterized by a mixture of colors, imagination and very personal expression; his paintings are often a vision of the moods of the artist himself. His creations are mental landscapes, where the color, carefully chosen, refers to the emotions that run through the artist.
Chagall died in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1985.