Marc Chagall

Born Moishe Shagal in 1887 near Vitebsk - then a shtetl in the Russian Empire's Pale of Settlement - he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin before World War I, forging his own style from Eastern European Jewish folklore and modernist forms. He returned to Russia during the war, founded the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and People's Art School, and became a leading avant-garde figure before the Bolshevik aftermath drove him back to Paris in 1923. World War II sent him to New York for seven years; he returned to France in 1948 and spent decades producing stained glass for Reims, Metz, the Fraumünster in Zürich, the UN, and Jerusalem, while painting part of the Paris Opéra ceiling. He lived through modernism's golden age, synthesizing Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism into something unmistakably his own, yet his work remained - as critic Robert Hughes put it - quintessentially Jewish: one long dreamy reverie of life in Vitebsk, rendered in colours no one else could touch.