Shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award 2008.

Costa Book Awards 2008 Judges' comment: "Not just the artist's life and his work but a chronicle of the shattering events of the 20th century. Great scholarship, enlightening observations about the paintings and an engaging style - we couldn't put it down."

Synopsis

"When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”

Picasso said this in the 1950s, when he and Chagall were eminent neighbours living in splendour on the Cote d'Azur. But behind Chagall's role as a pioneer of modern art lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, lost love, exile, and the miracle of survival.

Born the son of a Russian Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-coloured” czarist empire in 1911 to develop his genius in Paris, living alongside Modigliani and Leger in La Ruche, the artist's colony where “you either died or came out famous”. Through war and revolution in Bolshevik Russia, Weimar Berlin, occupied France and 1940s New York, he gave form to his dreams, longings and memories in paintings which are among the most humane and joyful of the 20th century.

Wullschlager has had exclusive access to hundreds of hitherto unseen and unpublished letters from the Chagall family collection in Paris, which are quoted here for the first time, lending Chagall's own unique voice to this account. Drawing also on numerous interviews with the artist's family, friends, dealers, collectors, and illustrated with two hundred paintings, drawings and photographs, many also previously unseen, this elegantly written biography gives for the first time a full and true account of Chagall the man and the artist - and of a life as intense, theatrical and haunting as his paintings.

About the Author

Jackie Wullschlager is a literary critic and European Arts Correspondent of the Financial Times. Her biography of Victorian and Edwardian children's writers, Inventing Wonderland, was published in 1995 to wide critical acclaim. She lives in London with her husband and three children. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation