In 1887, Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia.
Chagalls earlier works were based on everyday familiar subjects, water carriers, houses, processions over the hills.
Having failed the entrance exam to the school of Arts and Crafts in St Petersburg, he was admitted to the Society for the Protection of Arts. Here he gained a grant of ten roubles a month. The teaching here was non-existent, he admitted himself to a studio ran by Bakst.
He renewed his palette and discovered the expressive value of colour.
Chagall returned to Vitebsk with a a style of his own, still sombre and heavy but with flashes of light. He used it in scenes that are beyond direct observation, and represent the beginnings of an effort towards synthesis, these are great themes of life, birth marriage and death.
Paris, 1910, was a highly productive period, during this time he integrated the forms of the modern world with the disciplines that stemmed from Fauvism and Cubism to use his own expression. Describing the elements of reality seen through his imagination or memory. Reality always has projections into the past and the future. The laws of gravity do not apply in his people and objects. Almost all of his canvases of this period were selected by Apollinaire for the Chagall exhibition arranged in the Der Sturm Gallery, Berlin in 1914.
In 1935, profoundly affected by the atmosphere of persecution and war spreading over the world, Chagall introduced dramatic, social and religious elements into his pictures, he painted numerous crucifixions.
His importance in contemporary art increases daily. The unique and individual artistic achievements is reflected in many of the new developments of modern painting.
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