A Russian Jewish painter of Hasidic shtetl life, 23 years old and ignorant of French, Marc Chagall was an outsider by every measure when he emigrated to Cubist Paris in 1910. The border guards warily asked if he had lice, and Léon Bakst, one of the few Russian artists he knew in France, barely acknowledged him when they crossed paths. It was just the challenging creative environment that Chagall needed to excel. Within a year, he had no less than Guillaume Apollinaire standing inside his studio, blushing, smiling and declaring his work “surnaturel!”

Chagall lived for another seven and a half decades, surviving the other modern masters and amassing ever more acclaim. By 1969 the French government had granted him a personal museum—an honor even Picasso didn’t receive in his own lifetime. And today his market has soared, thanks in large part to Russian collectors’ thirst for art created by their countrymen. Chagall’s style is internationally recognizable, a bright blur of bouquets and horses and angels. Yet the dazzling expansiveness of his success obscured his accomplishment, rendering the originality that had made Apollinaire smile and blush almost unreachably remote, like ancient starlight seen through the wrong end of a telescope: Chagall became mythic.

In her new book on the artist (whose paintings for the theater will be displayed at New York’s Jewish Museum starting in November), the Financial Times art critic Jackie Wullschlager has reversed the telescope of history, providing a thorough account of Chagall’s life, both professional against a backdrop of artistic movements and world events, Chagall: A Biography lets us revisit his works in their native freshness.

Chagall is a natural subject for biography. “On his canvases we read the triumph of modernism, the breakthrough in art to an expression of inner life,” Wullschlager writes. “At the same time ... he distilled his experiences of suffering and tragedy into images at once immediate, simple and symbolic, to which everyone could respond.” For all the universal appeal that his painting achieved, Chagall’s art is far more diarylike than the Cubist and Suprematist works that surrounded him. His dreamy figuration derives from the village of Vitebsk, where he was born, from the Paris to which he escaped, from the Russia to which he returned during the Revolution and from the France where—aside from exile in New York during World War II—he spent the rest of his years. His painting certainly doesn’t need exegesis to be appreciated, yet the sweeping changes of the 20th century have rendered esoteric much that was commonplace to him.

For example, Chagall’s Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1913, refers to an old Yiddish expression, as Wullschlager explains: “To do something with seven fingers means to do it as well as one possibly can.” And the mysticism informing his imagery—the floating lovers and fiddlers on the roofs of buildings—is rooted in Hasidic tradition, “the miraculous in Vitebsk,” as Wullschlager puts it. When Apollinaire declared Chagall’s work “sur naturel,” he was voicing a Western exaltation of the exotic that would later be institutionalized by André Breton, who dubbed Chagall the father of Surrealism. Yet even in the Paris of 1911–14, Chagall was not so eccentric as to be incomprehensible. His success rested on his ability to project his eastern Jewish vision beyond the pale of the settlement.

Chagall made his foreignness intelligible and the ancient modern by giving timely treatment to timeless themes. While he learned his compositional rigor “through [C]ubism’s emphasis on form,” he contributed to Cubism qualities unexplored by Western artists. Chagall argued in his memoirs, from the 1920s, that the Cubists were “afraid of plunging into chaos, of shattering, of turning upside down the familiar ground under our feet.” Cubism gave him the formal means to do just that, in a visual language that French viewers could grasp. In return, he introduced French modernism to dreamy mysticism.