Marc Chagall was a Belarusian-born French artist whose work anticipated the dream-like imagery of Surrealism. Over the course of his career, Chagall developed the poetic, amorphous, and deeply personal visual language evident in paintings like I and the Village (1911). “When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand as a final test,” he said. “If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.” Born Moishe Shagal on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia (present-day Belarus) to a Hasidic Jewish family, the artist was raised immersed in Jewish culture and ...