Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, in today's Belarus, into a Hasidic Jewish family and reached Paris in 1910, where he absorbed Cubism and Fauvism into a dreamlike personal language of lovers, villages, animals and musicians. He returned to Russia during the war, left for good in 1922, spent the Second World War in the United States and lived his last decades in the south of France. He worked in painting, prints, stained glass, mosaics and stage design across a very long career. That huge output gives him one of the deepest markets in Modern art, with hundreds of lots a year. Paintings from before 1940 are the most sought after, and his record is $28.5 million, set in New York in 2017.