By Jackie Wullschlager
Allen Lane, £30
Brightly coloured lovers flying over Russian rooftops; synagogues and rabbis; violinists; the odd donkey or two: few artists have a more easily recognisable style than Marc Chagall.
But Chagall is a whole heap of contradictions. He used his art as a means of escaping the small-town Russian-Jewish life of his childhood, only to spend much of his artistic life evoking the very kind of community in which he grew up. He was fascinated by everything that was modern in early 20th century modern art, but was not interested in making the kinds of images that other modern artists were making, preferring to focus on his own, seemingly old-fashioned preoccupations: religion, home, and the transports of love. He succeeded in making modern art out of the lost world of the old Jewish Vitebsk (his "sad and joyful town", pretty much razed to the ground in the Second World War).
Chagall is the painter of nostalgia. He experienced more than his fair share of the turmoil of the first half of the 20th century and had to pack his bags frequently, moving from one European capital to another - Petrograd Paris, Berlin - before finally settling in the States. He knew all about being displaced, in other words, and about having crises of identity, and it was out of that he made his art.