(wind whooshing gently) - My passion really was never to make a lotta money.

It was just to collect art and share it and help in some small way to create world peace through the exchange of visual culture.

That's my goal.

(bright piano music) My mission to start with is to preserve artist legacies.

Marc Chagall was a Russian artist who grew up in a small farm town in Russia.

He was really his own person completely.

He doesn't really fit in to any one genre.

Partly folk art, partly surrealist.

You could've considered him an outsider artist.

(bright piano music continues) - So this is his self-portrait, one of several.

I always like highlighting an artist's self-portrait because it really can tell you a lot about them as an artist and how they see the world by the way they depict themselves.

Here we see Chagall at the easel.

He has his palette and brushes in hand.

He also has his hand on his heart.

And to me, that just really speaks to how his heart informed his painting.

He talked a lot about how his love for art was what he put down on canvas.

(bright piano music fades out) (light music) (title chiming) (light music continues) (light music continues) (light music fades out) - The particular works that we have here in this show, his lithographs, the colors that he could achieve are unlike any other artist.

Picasso said that after Matisse passes away, the greatest colorist in the world would be Marc Chagall.

Most artists would go to the art supply store and they'd buy their materials, right?

But Chagall would have his pigments ground from raw minerals.

So he was able to get amazing, sophisticated colors and nuances that I've never seen from any other artist.

- So this piece right here is titled "Still Life in Brown."

What I really love about it is when you first look at it, it doesn't really register as still life.

It has the fruit and the dishes and the normal things that you would find in a typical still life, but then there's this goat prancing around on the table and kind of a chicken floating in the air.

And it's also framed in this kind of window so that the outside and the inside kind of dissolve into this surreal scene that Chagall is drawing for us.

Another thing that's really interesting about this is, so many of the lithographs in this show highlight Chagall's kind of fantastical, whimsical use of color.

But he also knew how to scale back and just kind of let the lines and forms speak for themselves.

So this one's mostly black and white and kind of neutral tones with just little hints of color.

- [David] He was religious.

So a lot of his works are based on the Bible and the Old Testament.

But he also did many different things with his works.

(gentle piano music) - Chagall designed this for the ballet "Daphnis and Chloe."

And you really get a sense of that lyrical movement and just flowiness.

(gentle piano music continues) One of the things that's interesting about this is that Chagall often worked with Biblical stories, but he also incorporated kind of Greek mythology into his work.

"Daphnis and Chloe" was an ancient Greek tale.

This is Daphnis right here and Chloe and the god Pan right here playing his flute.

Daphnis and Chloe grew up together.

They fall in love.

They're separated by crazy events.

They're kidnapped.

And just when all seems lost, Pan brings them back together.

- [David] Chagall has been one of those artists that I've always admired.

(expansive classical music) He was a poet and he expressed his ideas visually.

(expansive classical music fades out) (light music) - [Announcer] Thanks for watching "The Arts Page."

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