Marc Chagall is a famous Russian-French artist who was involved in the Surrealist & Expressionist art movements of the 20th century. As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known paintings of our time. Chagall's paintings helped him become one of the most famous Jewish and Modernist painters of all time. Chagall was also involved in the fields of book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Pablo Picasso is quoted as saying in the 1950s that, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is." Chagall was born in the former Russian Empire in a city called Vitebsk, in what is now Belarus.

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Chagall moved to Paris in 1910 and began to develop his own artistic style. Art historian and curator James Sweeney notes that when Chagall first arrived in Paris, Cubism was the dominant art form and French art was still dominated by the "materialistic outlook of the 19th century." During his time in Paris Chagall was constantly reminded of his home in Russia, as Paris was also home to many Russian painters, writers, poets, composers, dancers, and other émigre′s. However, "night after night he painted until dawn," only then going to bed for a few hours, and resisted the many temptations of the big city at night.

Contemporary artists did not yet understand or even like Chagall's art. According to Baal-Teshuva, "they had little in common with a folkloristic storyteller of Russo-Jewish extraction with a propensity for mysticism." The Paris School, which was referred to as 'Parisian Surrealism,' meant little to them. Those attitudes would begin to change, however, when Pierre Matisse, the son of recognized French artist Henri Matisse, became his representative and held Chagall exhibitions in New York and Chicago in 1941. One of the earliest exhibitions included 21 of his masterpieces from 1910 to 1941.

Chagall's work during all stages of his life, it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention. In his earlier years his range was limited by his emphasis on form and his pictures never gave the impression of painted drawings. After absorbing the techniques of Fauvism and Cubism, he was able to blend them with his own folkish style. Chagall had a complex relationship with Judaism. On the one hand, he credited his Russian Jewish cultural background as being crucial to his artistic imagination. But however ambivalent he was about his religion, he could not avoid drawing upon his Jewish past for artistic material. Chagall biographer Jackie Wullschlager calls Chagall a "pioneer of modern art and one of its greatest figurative painters. . . [who] invented a visual language that recorded the thrill and terror of the twentieth century."

Find below a comprehensive list of key Marc Chagall paintings:

• Young Woman on a Sofa
• The Wedding
• The Birth
• I and the Village
• The Green Donkey (L'Ane vert)
• Adam and Eve
• Paris through the window
• Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers
• The Violinist
• The Birthday
• The Poet Reclining
• Bella with White Collar
• Houses at Vitebsk
• The Blue House
• Two Clowns on Horseback
• The Tailor
• The Fall of the Angels
• Green Violinist
• The Vision (L'Apparition)
• The Cat Transformed Into A Woman (La Chatte métamorphosée en Femme)
• Dream Village
• The Female Acrobat
• Solitude
• Bouquet with Flying Lovers (Bouquet aux amoureux volants)
• The White Crucifixion
• Midsummer Night's Dream
• The Red Rooster
• The Yellow Crucifixion
• Madonna with sleighs
• The Firebird
• La Mariée
• Lovers in the Red Sky
• The Dance and The Circus (La Dance et le cirque)
• The Blue Circus (Le Cirque bleu)
• Moses receiving the Tablets of the Law
• The Green Night
• The Bastille
• Bridge over the Seine
• Champ de mars
• The Crossing of the Red Sea
• Commedia dell'arte
• Self-portrait
• Stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital
• King David
• Ceiling of the Garnier Opera
• Exodus
• Wall art for the Knesset in Jerusalem
• War
• Mosaic murals in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera, New York
• Stage settings for
• Biblical-themed windows
• The Prophet Jeremiah
• Job
• Biblical Message
• America Windows
• The Yellow Donkey
• Four Seasons
• Family
• Nine biblical-themed windows in luminous blue
• The Great Parade
• The Jerusalem Windows