VIENNA, AUSTRIA.- The BA-CA Kunstforum is showing an exhibition devoted to the most important phase in the work of Marc Chagall, the years up until 1922, when he made his inimitable mark on the art of the classical modern era. Chagall's work unites the formalaesthetic achievements of the Paris avant-garde with the wild, tenderly poetic exultation in narrative of his native Russian. The exhibition gathers together more than a hundred works of an artist who is probably the most renowned representative of the flamboyant and the exotic in the history of art.

Chagall – Masterpieces 1908-1922 takes as its theme the most significant and permanently telling years of this great painter. It is Chagall's early work that most deeply affected artists and public: the stories from the Shtetl, the magical-rhapsodic world of Mother Russia, captured in thrillingly expressive painting that casts a spell over his contemporaries and their descendants alike. A special highpoint will be the unique, extremely fragile and monumental murals made in 1920 for the Moscow Jewish Theatre - a multi-layered composition on several canvases, which combines motifs from Jewish and Russian folk art and synagogue painting to unfold an astonishing spectrum of the Yiddisher world. The combination of a rich art of narrative with Chagall's characteristically unorthodox compositional structure, his audacious use of colour and his own special poetic sensibility makes this work into one of the icons of classical modern painting.

This, the exhibition's main work, is accompanied by important paintings, water colours and drawings from the period between 1908 and 1922. Besides rarely shown pictures from the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the exhibition is presenting the complete Chagall collection of the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg: it will be the very first opportunity to see the holdings of these major collections of Russian art together in Austria. The selection is augmented by significant loans from the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, and other international museums and private collections.