Marc Chagall

By the late 1920s, Chagall was well known in very corner of the Western art world and by the mid-1930s he was almost as great an international art celebrity as Picasso, Mattisse, and Miro.

As he became increasingly more famous, he was honored not only by numerous exhibitions, but by commissions from institutions around the world that wanted murals, stained-glass windows, mosaics, or large paintings from him and were willing to pay the very high prices his art was beginning to receive after World War II. It was about that time, however, that the quality of his work began to decline.

Even so, his contributions to 20th-century art have been deep and important and undoubtedly will remain of interest for centuries to come. In the meantime he will continue to rank among the handful of painters and sculptors who gave modernism its right to be called great.