Histoire de la Peinture Moderne de Picasso au Surrealisme, French, 1950

Described by art critic Robert Hughes as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century," the Russian-French modernist Marc Chagall worked in nearly every artistic medium. Influenced by Symbolism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism, he developed his own distinctive style, combining avant-garde techniques and motifs with elements drawn from Eastern European Jewish folk art.

Born Moishe Segal in 1887, in Belarus (then part of the Russian empire), Chagall is often celebrated for his figurative paintings, but he also produced stained-glass windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, in France; for the United Nations, in New York; and for the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, as well as book illustrations, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine-art prints. Characterized by a bold color palette and whimsical imagery, his works are often narrative, depicting small-village scenes and quotidian moments of peasant life, as in his late painting The Flight into Egypt from 1980.

Before World War I, Chagall traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris and Berlin. When the conflict broke out, he returned to Soviet-occupied Belarus, where he founded the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922. He fled to the United States during World War II but in 1947 returned to France, where he spent the rest of his life. His peripatetic career left its mark on his style, which was distinctly international, incorporating elements from each of the cultures he experienced.

Marc Chagall remains one of the past century’s most respected talents — find his art on 1stDibs.

Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism.

Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre) — which were published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks — are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance.

Klee and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.

Find original Paul Klee prints and other art on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by Cerbera Gallery)