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“... Moishe Shagal​ , later known as Marc Chagall, was raised in the last years of the 19th century in Vitebsk, one of the shtetls in the Pale of Settlement, the part of the Russian Empire to which the Jewish population had been confined since the days of Catherine the Great. He is known as a storyteller in painting and a colourist, but in the early years of his career he was above all a Jewish artist, which means that his greatest achievement, coming from a background in which there was hardly any tradition of the visual arts, was becoming a painter at all ...”

“... At the time of his death at the age of 97 in 1985, Marc Chagall was, if not the world’s best-known living artist (as much trademark as painter), certainly its best loved. The School of Paris’s last surviving master was dismissed by some as a purveyor of high-class kitsch and hailed by others as one of the 20th century’s truly popular artists, but no one denied Chagall’s power as a colourist or the distinctiveness of his iconography: the embracing lovers, joyful barnyard creatures, tumbledown villages and Jewish musicians, among other free-floating symbols ...”

“... and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the young Claude Lévi-Strauss … A band of surrealists led by Max Ernst (Tristan Tzara, Wifredo Lam, André Breton among them) hid in the spooky Villa Air-Bel in the city’s outskirts. Marseille was in ...”

“... aristocracy from the toppled Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as artists like the Russian painter Marc Chagall.’ In the song ‘Alma’ – written soon after her obituaries appeared in December 1964 – Tom Lehrer imagines all modern women being jealous of her ‘for bagging Gustav and Walter and Franz’. How did she do it? At first, at least, she ...”

“... Much of the best imagery and circumstance of those years is taken from the German painters Franz Marc (1880-1916) and especially August Macke (1887-1914), currently the subjects of a joint exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie (until 20 June). Marc, born in Munich, and Macke, a Rhinelander (which in German connotes ...”

“... painting will win history’s race against that of ‘lesser but more popular artists such as Marc Chagall’; then again, maybe not. The pessimistic, dystopian Hughes speaks with no less confidence than his optimistic twin. His voice was already developed by 1968, when he wrote Heaven and Hell in Western Art: ‘The weapon, wielded by an ...”