Consequently, this display is only partly about Chagall, a bit about Kandinsky, and very much about the general artistic direction Russian artists took at the turn of the last century, followed by the early years of the Bolshevik era when it appeared that artists were finally able to shed Czarist censorship and have total artistic freedom in their country. Of course, it soon turned out not to be so and the majority of the artists in this exhibit ended up living and working in Germany, France and finally the United States to escape persecution, either because they were Jews or because they created art unacceptable to the totalitarian mind-set of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany and Vichy France.

Each of the five sections of the show has been hung, so to speak, on super-star Chagall's coattail, with the only other instantly recognizable artist, Kandinsky, adding the supporting role. Each section is then rounded off with the works of the lesser known Russians whose impact on art world-wide is minor, but of importance to Russia. All of them, Chagall and Kandinsky included, sought inspiration in their early years in local folk art and icons to create what they hoped to be a uniquely Russian modern vision. Russian folk art is famous for its strong colors and bold patterns, which explains the bold colors used by Kandinsky and Chagall in most of their works. In addition, most of this group of artists had responded strongly to western artists such as Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and even the cubists.

When walking through this extensive exhibit, it soon becomes clear that some of the lesser known artists may nevertheless, have become the forerunners of Italy's brutalist style of sculpture and architecture under Mussolini, of the völkische art fostered by the Nazis, and the social realism of the Soviets and Maoist China. Among this group are Alexander Arpichenko, Jacques Lipchitz, Kasimir Malevitch, El Lissitsky and Ossip Zadkine.

What is also of interest is the strong influence the painter Natalia S. Gontcharova seems to have had on the Russian avant-garde in the early years if its awakening. She is represented by nine canvases of extra-ordinary strong imagery, and one lithograph. She appears to overshadow her husband, Mikhail F. Larionov, represented by six canvases. Both left Russia permanently around 1919, settled in Paris and became French citizens. It would be interesting to know how they managed to survive the occupation era. Both died in Paris in the 1960s. Fortunately, but sadly, only one artist in the show fell victim to the Nazis. Vladimir Barnoff Rossine, who was a painter as well as inventor, was arrested in Paris in 1943 and died in Auschwitz in 1944.

Chagall had left Russia for Paris in 1910. When WWI broke out he returned to Russia and remained there throughout the war years. He then became involved in the artistic movement that supported the revolution. Among others, he founded the Vitebsk Arts College to which he attracted many of Russia's most important artists. He was named commissar of arts for Vitebsk, where he had been born in the city's Jewish quarter. Soon, however, he realized that his style was out of step with the other artists and he resigned from the school and post to return with his wife and child to Paris in 1922.

This show makes it very clear that Chagall had an individual style that made him unique. At the same time this exhibit reveals that this artist in his mind never left his hometown, and his Jewish roots, although he was not a practicing Jew. Viewing his work in this show it is clear that the Hassidic background influenced him, yet he went against the very tenet of his ancestral religion by becoming a figurative painter and revealing the human face. He resisted abstractionism, preferring surrealism and expressionism, which allowed him to express wit, whimsy and concentrate on storytelling.

Kandinsky, a senior of Chagall's by 21 years, had originally studied law and economics. He did not begin to paint until he was 30, leaving Russia in 1896 to study art in Munich, to return to his country only in 1914 at the outbreak of WW I. He returned to Germany in 1921 at the invitation of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. He moved to France in 1933 when the Nazis closed the Bauhaus. Like Chagall, Kandinsky found himself at odds with many of the new Russian artists working in support of the revolution. They condemned his individualistic style as too bourgeois. Kandinsky, at first a landscapist and figurative artist, who firmly turned to expressionism and eventually abstraction after leaving Russia.