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The Marc Chagall of popular consciousness is a magical realist whose art is perfect for posters but a little insipid. The Financial Times art critic Jackie Wullschlager’s masterful new biography of the Russian Jewish artist challenges this lazy notion. She describes this flawed genius in the context that defined him and demonstrates how his art, at its peak, offered an extraordinary mystical lament for a world he saw vanish. Chagall was born in the Jewish Pale in Russia in 1887, the son of a labourer in a herring factory. By the time he died in France in 1985 — the last surviving master of European modernism, outliving Joan Miró by two years — he had experienced at first hand the high hopes and crushing disappointments of the Russian revolution, and had witnessed the end of the Pale, the near annihilation of European Jewry, and the obliteration of Vitebsk, his home town, where only 118 of a population of 240,000 survived the Second World War.