Born and raised in the small Belarusian town of Vitebsk, Marc Chagall attended the
Swanzewa art school in St. Petersburg from 1907 to 1910, where he became a pupil of
Leon Bakst. In 1910, he followed Bakst to Paris, where he met a number of writers and
artists of the current art movements. In 1914, Herwarth Walden organised his first solo
exhibition at the Berlin gallery ‘Der Sturm’. Chagall returns to Vitebsk, where he is
surprised by the outbreak of the First World War. In 1918, Chagall becomes
‘Commissioner for the Fine Arts’ in Vitebsk. He founded an art academy to which he
appointed El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich as professors. In 1919/20, Chagall went to
Moscow, where he painted important murals for the Jewish City Theatre. In 1922, Chagall
leaves Russia for good. He lived briefly in Berlin and from 1923 in Paris. From 1923 to
1939, he designed book illustrations for the art dealer A. Vollard for Gogol's ‘Dead Souls’,
La Fontaine's fables and finally the Bible. In 1941, Chagall was arrested in Marseille
during a police raid, but an intervention by the USA saved him from being extradited to
the Germans. Chagall lived in the USA, mainly in New York, until 1946, the year of his
return to France. The Museum of Modern Art organises a large-scale Chagall
retrospective in 1946.
From 1950 to 1970, Chagall received numerous commissions for public buildings. Chagall
designed stained glass windows for Metz Cathedral, Notre-Dame Cathedral in Reims, the
synagogue of the Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem and St Stephen's Church in
Mainz. From 1963, he painted a ceiling mural for the dome above the auditorium of the
Opéra Garnier in Paris. In 1964, he began to paint murals for the Metropolitan Opera in
New York. In 1950, Marc Chagall moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he died on 28
March 1985. Chagall's creative power remained unbroken into old age.