Chagall is the painter of the dream, a Russian-Jewish modernist whose work translated the rituals, animals, weather, and figures of his Belorussian childhood into a personal visual mythology that became one of the most recognizable artistic languages of the twentieth century.
Chagall came to art from a world that has now almost entirely vanished. The Vitebsk of his childhood was a Jewish shtetl-and-marketplace town in the Russian Pale of Settlement, with synagogues, dairies, fiddler's weddings, and the ritual life of the Eastern European Jewish religious tradition; that world, partly remembered and partly imagined, became the inexhaustible material of his subsequent painting. His early training there was strict and academic, but his own visual instincts were already unconventional by the time he reached Saint Petersburg.
The decisive period of his early career was his first stay in Paris between 1911 and 1914. He lived in La Ruche, the working-artist dormitory in Montparnasse where he met Apollinaire, Léger, Modigliani, and Soutine, and absorbed the most advanced European tendencies of the period. The synthesis he produced, geometric construction of space combined with saturated color and the explicit narrative iconography of Russian-Jewish folk life, was unlike anything else then being made, and the canvases of those years have since been recognized as some of the most original early-twentieth-century European painting.
The Russian Revolution caught him at home. He served briefly as Commissar of Arts for the new Soviet government in his region, helped found the local museum and art school, and quarrelled productively with Kazimir Malevich over the direction of Soviet painting before leaving for Moscow and then for the West. The move back to France placed him in the country that would be his home for most of the rest of his life.
The Second World War interrupted that life. Forced to flee France for the United States, he spent the war years in New York and Cranberry Lake, New York, designing sets and costumes for Stravinsky's Firebird and producing the body of paintings that registered the destruction of the European Jewish world he had been painting his whole life. The death of his wife Bella in 1944 deepened the elegiac quality of his late work without changing its essential vocabulary.
His postwar career produced the great public commissions, the cathedral and synagogue windows, the opera-house ceilings, the murals for civic and cultural buildings, that placed his work in the most visible interiors of mid-century Western culture. He was decorated with the French Légion d'Honneur and elected to many of the principal European honours academies, and his death near the Mediterranean coast where he had lived for decades closed a working life of nearly eighty years. His position today is settled at the highest level of twentieth-century European painting: he remains the central artist of modern Jewish visual culture, and one of the most beloved painters of the modern era.