Page "Marc Chagall" Paragraph 3

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist.

He experienced modernism's " golden age " in Paris, where " he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism ".

Yet throughout these phases of his style " he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk.

" " When Matisse dies ," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, " Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is ".