When Russian-born artist Marc Chagall died in 1985 at age ninety-seven, he left behind a remarkably prolific and varied body of work. In a career that spanned over three-quarters of a century, Chagall produced paintings, stained glass, mosaics, engravings, and other items in nearly every artistic medium available. Greatly admired for his whimsical images, at his death, according to Newsweek's Jack Kroll, Chagall was "probably the most widely popular artist of the modern era." The magical, child-like quality of his work appealed across cultures and generations. His works were able to transcend both time and culture, as Robert Hughes notes in Time, with images from his boyhood and youth that "furnished the unaltering ground of his work for 80 years." While some art critics viewed his later works as almost embarrassingly sentimental, he continued to paint and receive commissions for numerous public art projects even as he approached the...