
Chagall was known to have two basic reputations: as a pioneer of
modernism, and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced
modernism's golden age in Paris, where "he synthesized the art
forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of
Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism." Yet throughout these phases of
his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose
work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of
Vitebsk." "When Matisse dies", Pablo Picasso remarked in the
1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands
what colour really is."