The violent calamities of 20th-century Europe dislocated Marc Chagall’s life, but they are seldom directly referred to in his art. As a young painter in Paris before World War I, he developed a signature mix of floating figures, uncanny animals, ramshackle townscapes and religious symbols, inspired by his hometown of Vitebsk, a largely Jewish city in the Russian Empire. Later he would spend time in post-revolutionary Moscow, Weimar-era Berlin and 1940s New York, all hotbeds of artistic innovation. But Chagall’s colorful, gravity-free imagery remained consistent, from his adventurous early paintings to grand late works like his extravagant ceiling panels for Paris’s Palais Garnier opera house, completed in the 1960s.
