Later this week, the Royal
Academy will unveil a major exhibition of the work of Marc Chagall. To many, Chagall is the great optimist of 20th-century art, the man whose colourful images of village life and love evoke a vanished age of innocent happiness. But, as Dr Harry Shukman shows, Chagall's early development was deeply affected by three very different influences: the small-town Jewish culture in which he was brought up; the ferment of ideas around the Russian Revolution; and the great artistic cosmopolitanism of Paris.
Producer DANIEL SNOWMAN