Often compared with various art movements, such as late Fauvism or nascent Cubism, Chagall did not belong to any school and worked in total freedom. He used to say, “I don’t want to be the same as others, I want to see a new world”-which is probably why the style of his compositions is so unique. In fact, his depiction of people, animals and objects often defies the laws of imagination, gravity and even logic.

Throughout his particularly rich and diverse career, Chagall took on a multitude of important commissions, both public and private. The artist created stained glass windows in Metz, Reims, Jerusalem and at the United Nations headquarters in New York, Zurich and Mainz. In addition, he painted a fresco at the Opéra National de Paris and a curtain at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He has also done mosaics-The Four Seasons, 1974, Chicago-, tapestries, including the Gobelins tapestries woven for the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), and plays such as the sets and costumes for Daphnis et Chloé at the Opéra national de Paris.

Chagall also produced a large number of lithographs and etchings for illustrations and ceramics. After meeting Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, with whom he could converse in Russian, he also tried his hand at poetry. In 1973 the Marc Chagall National Museum was opened in Nice, France. Marc Chagall died in 1985 in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he is buried, leaving behind a prolific, sometimes daring, but always exciting body of work.

His works have been and still are exhibited and retrospected worldwide and are in many prestigious public and private collections such as the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Musée du Louvre and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, to name a few.