Chagall: Painter of Poetry
By Simon Elliott
Hardback, 240 pp, $24.99
“Poet, dreamer, and exotic apparition…” This is a graphic novel about the colourful life of modernist pioneer Marc Chagall.
The artist Marc Chagall (1887–1985) once described painting as “a window through which I could fly into another world” – which is just what he did. He grew up Jewish in the so-called Pale of Settlement (now Belarus) in the Russian Empire, relocating to Paris in 1910, at the height of the “Belle Époque”, and then served an uncomfortable time as an art commissar in Bolshevik Russia. He would spend his long lifetime outrunning and outliving a succession of oppressive régimes (Tsarist, Soviet, Fascist, Nazi) as numerous as the art movements he absorbed (surrealist, fauvist, symbolist, modernist) and the range of media he both liberated and illuminated. In his ceramics, stained glass, tapestry – above all, in his paintings – Chagall brought the freedom of his “colours of love” to a stark world that is too often too dark.
The artist Marc Chagall (1887–1985) once described painting as “a window through which I could fly into another world” – which is just what he did. He grew up Jewish in the so-called Pale of Settlement (now Belarus) in the Russian Empire, relocating to Paris in 1910, at the height of the “Belle Époque”, and then served an uncomfortable time as an art commissar in Bolshevik Russia. He would spend his long lifetime outrunning and outliving a succession of oppressive régimes (Tsarist, Soviet, Fascist, Nazi) as numerous as the art movements he absorbed (surrealist, fauvist, symbolist, modernist) and the range of media he both liberated and illuminated. In his ceramics, stained glass, tapestry – above all, in his paintings – Chagall brought the freedom of his “colours of love” to a stark world that is too often too dark.
Acclaimed for his graphic biographies of Hockney (2023), Van Gogh (2024), and Kusama (2025), Simon Elliott returns with a triumphant portrait of perhaps the greatest colourist (and therefore optimist) of them all.
Simon Elliott
Simon Elliott is a criminal barrister, art obsessive and stand-up comedian. Inspired by Hockney’s message in 2021 that “spring cannot be cancelled”, Simon put his lockdown to good use by engrossing himself in all things Hockney, learning how to paint on an iPad, and creating his first graphic novel – Hockney: A Graphic Life (Frances Lincoln, 2023), which was published with Mr Hockney’s blessing. His other works include Vincent: A Graphic Biography (Frances Lincoln, 2024), and Kusama: Polka Dot Queen (SelfMadeHero, 2025).