One of the best-loved artists of the 20th century, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is paradoxically one of the least understood. He did much to encourage an image of himself as an entirely intuitive genius, but although his work seems naive in style and iconography, he was in fact a complex and sophisticated individual. In this comprehensive and analytical book Monica Bohm-Duchen places the artist firmly in his social, religious and cultural context, examining his prodigious output not only in painting but also in book illustration, theatre design, stained glass and poetry. She follows Chagall from his Russian-Jewish childhood, through his encounter with the Parisian avant-garde in the years prior to World War I and his activities in revolutionary Russia, to his later years in the South of France, where he died at the age of ninety-seven. The first survey of Chagall's work to take full advantage of new material available to the West since Glasnost, the book encourages a critical reappraisal of all phases of the artist's long career.

Author Biography

Monica Bohm-Duchen is known for her work as an organizer of exhibitions and as a lecturer and writer on twentieth-century art. She is author of The Nude and Understanding Modern Art, and contributor to the catalogue: Chagall, Love and the Stage (Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1998).