"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.", Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall (Moishe Shagal, July 7, 1887 – March 28, 1985) was a Russian-French painter, printmaker, set designer, ceramicist, and stained-glass artist, and one of the major figures of twentieth-century European modernism. Born into a poor Jewish family in Vitebsk, in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire (now Belarus), the eldest of nine children, he began his art training in 1906 under the realist Yehuda Pen in Vitebsk and continued in Saint Petersburg before moving to Paris in 1911. There he absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism into a personal idiom rooted in the imagery of Russian-Jewish folk life, religion, and the small town of his childhood, flying lovers, fiddlers on roofs, animals, weddings, and synagogues, that would remain the constant of his work.
He returned to Russia at the outbreak of the First World War, founded the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and the People's Art School in the years immediately after the Russian Revolution, and emigrated permanently to France in 1923. He spent the Second World War as a refugee in the United States (1941–1948) and returned to France for the rest of his life, settling on the Côte d'Azur. His major late commissions, the ceiling of the Palais Garnier (Paris Opera) painted in 1964, the murals for the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center in New York, and the stained-glass windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, the Fraumünster in Zurich, the UN headquarters, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Hadassah Hospital synagogue in Jerusalem, extended his work into the most prominent civic and religious interiors of the twentieth century. His paintings are held in essentially every major collection of modern art, including the Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice (built specifically for his biblical message cycle), the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Tate, and the Tretyakov Gallery.