Marc Chagall (7 July 1887 28 March 1985), was a RussianFrench artist, associated with several key art movements and was one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. He created a unique career in virtually every artistic medium, including paintings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall's haunting, exuberant, and poetic images have enjoyed universal appeal, with art critic Robert Hughes referring to him as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."He was known to have 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."Source: Wikipedia