Marc Chagall stands among the most beloved artists of the twentieth century, yet his life remained as kaleidoscopic and elusive as his paintings. Jackie Wullschlager, chief art critic of the Financial Times, delivers the definitive biography of this pioneering modernist who transformed personal memory into universal poetry. Born Moishe Segal in the Belarusian shtetl of Vitebsk in 1887, Chagall witnessed the dissolution of traditional Jewish life, survived two world wars, and outlived most of his contemporaries to die in Provence at ninety-seven. Wullschlager traces his journey from the cramped streets where Hasidic mysticism mingled with everyday commerce, through revolutionary Russia where he briefly served as Commissar for Art, to Paris where he found his artistic voice among Picasso, Apollinaire, and the avant-garde. The biography excavates Chagall's complex relationships: his consuming love for first wife Bella, whose death devastated him; his difficult second marriage to Vava, who controlled access to his legacy; and his rivalries with contemporaries. Wullschlager draws on previously unavailable archives and family sources to reveal how Chagall's floating lovers, fiddlers on rooftops, and luminous stained glass windows emerged from specific memories of Jewish Vitebsk even as they spoke to audiences worldwide. The book illuminates how an artist from the margins of Europe came to define modernism's lyrical possibilities while never abandoning the vanished world that shaped his imagination.