Author(s): Jackie Wullschlager

Biography

'When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is'. Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbors living in splendor on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival. Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive 'potato-colored' czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where 'you either died or came out famous'.Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century. Wullschlager has had exclusive access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished letters from the Chagall family collection in Paris, which are quoted here for the first time, lending Chagall's own unique voice to this account.