“Only the great distance that separates Paris from my native town prevented me from going back… It was the Louvre that put end to all these hesitations. When I walked around the circular Veronese room and the rooms that the works of Manet, Delacroix and Courbet are in, I desired nothing more. In my imagination Russia [where Chagall was born] took the form of a basket suspended from a parachute. The deflated pear of the balloon was hanging down, growing cold and descending slowly in the course of the years. This was how Russian art appeared to me, or something of the sort… It was as if Russian art had been fatally condemned to remain in the wake of the West.”

—  Marc Chagall

a later quote on his first arrival in Paris, 1910
Quote in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 261, (translation Daphne Woodward)
1920's, My life (1922)

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French artist and painter 1887–1985

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“The sun has only ever shone for me in France (it certainly did that!). I have got used to beating the streets of Paris, happy beyond words dreaming of a life 125 years long - with the Louvre radiant in the distance. (Chagall couldn't go back to Paris because of the outbreak of the first World War in 1914). Having ended up in the Russian provinces, << I have decided to die >>.”

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