Very large hardcover with 775 pages. Dust jacket has some slight paper loss on top of spine. In good condition. When Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exileand above all the miracle of survival.

Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive potato-colored tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where one either died or came out famous. But turmoil lay aheadwar and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout,  he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.