Marc Chagall

Born in Russia in 1887, Marc Chagall came to Paris in 1910 and entered the arena of European painting. From his Belorussian and eastern Jewish origins, Chagall brought into play entirely new vistas of irrational perception from dreams, visions, and legends. Such fantasy altered and enhanced the expressive power of color and the new formal organization of the picture and was quite different from the French use of color, which was based on theories of the objective and the rational.

What interested the poets and thinkers most about Chagall, however, was the unexpected widening of the intellectual horizon, in which images of dreams, memory, and fantasy become just as important as visible reality, and where even natural objects acquired legendary and mythical associations.