The Albertina Museum in Vienna recently opened a large retrospective of Marc Chagall’s art. The show, which runs until February, includes some 90 works by the Russian-French painter, who died in 1985 at the age of 97. Described by Robert Hughes, an Australian art critic, as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century,” Chagall was best known for his dream-like scenes of Jewish village life in pre-revolutionary Russia. The artist was born into a working-class Hasidic family in what is now Belarus. He studied in St Petersburg and Paris, and left Russia permanently in 1922. He narrowly escaped the Holocaust. Having left Marseilles in 1941 with the help of an American diplomat, he lived in New York for six years before returning to France. The Albertina’s own huge collection holds many of Chagall’s works. But the exhibition also brings paintings from Paris, New York, Venice and Basel.
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