From the Renaissance to the present day,
A basic art series where you can meet the masters of art history!
Returning with larger format and illustrations

The Basic Art Series began in 1985 with a collection of Picasso works and has since grown into a best-selling art book collection.
Since then, over 200 concise and thin books by each author have been produced and published in over 20 languages.
The series has excellent production values, excellent artwork, and intelligent content.
The thematic awareness of each book is vibrant yet accessible, making it easy to approach.
It has been republished 15 years after the first Korean edition was published in 2005.
This [Basic Art 2.0] series delivers more vivid images of the artwork to readers with larger formats and illustrations than before.

A painter like poetry
A world of floating symbols

For Marc Chagall (1887-1985), paintings are like tapestries imbued with dreams, stories and traditional rituals.
Chagall's instantly recognizable visual language found niche success in the early 20th century, often identified as one of the earliest expressions of spiritual experience.
Chagall's canvases reveal leisurely brushstrokes and strong colors, and his love for the color blue is particularly evident.
It is characterized by a recurring repertoire of musicians, roosters, rooftops, flowers, and floating lovers.
Despite this unique charm of Chagall, his works were often extravagant and complex.
It was not just a color and a shape, but also a symbol of hope, a symbol of my Jewish roots, my current situation in Paris, a sign of trust through a gesture of love, and evidence of trauma.
Beyond scenes of birth, love, marriage, and death, introducing this venerable artist is like exploring Chagall's rich and varied vocabulary.

He portrayed his unusual life in bizarre images.
His life and art are all woven into the images he creates: a lonely dreamer, a citizen living in a world of inner childlike innocence, and a stranger who has lost his sense of wonder.
Chagall created images of everything around him.
These works, imbued with devout faith and love for their homeland, are a desperate appeal for modern society to recognize differences and respect one another.
--- p.7, from “Russian Years - Boyhood: 1887-1910”

At the time, promising young Russian artists believed they could gain recognition more quickly in Paris than in their homeland.
Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Ballet, composed of dancers, musicians, writers and painters, created a sensation in Paris with its majestic and exotic atmosphere, captivating audiences and inspiring a yearning for the East.
Russia was 'in such a longing'.
Artists of world renown, including Alexei von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jacques Lipchitz, all wanted to gain experience in Paris, the birthplace of modernism.
Bakst went to Paris in 1909 to work with Diaghilev, and Chagall also traveled to Paris by train for four days in the fall of 1910, with funding from his St. Petersburg patron Max Vinabert.
He set up his first studio in an apartment building in Montmartre where his fellow Russians lived.
--- p.15, from “Paris Years: 1910-1914”

“Everything in Vitebsk is a world in itself.
“It is a peculiar village, an unhappy village, a boring village.” (My Life, p. 119) However, in light of Chagall’s experiences a few years later, it seems that the place he described as “boring” was Paris rather than his hometown.
While Chagall worked tirelessly, the elite bohemian society of France remained peaceful and safe.
His works from his Parisian period were not motivated by an attempt to understand the reality of the big city, but by self-reflection and a search for a source of vitality.
But now war and revolution determined Chagall's life and art.
And Chagall was put in a situation where he had to agonize over his own existence.
--- p.35, from “War and the Russian Revolution: 1914-1923”

In the early days of his new Parisian period, Chagall painted two identical pictures.
He seems to have thought that by producing two pieces he could protect himself from the conspiracies of the art market.
Additionally, he began to copy works he already had or to redraw lost paintings from memory.
His desire to recover works lost in the war and his sense of loss at having lost a part of himself drove him to engage in this repetitive labor.

--- p.54, from “France and the United States: 1923-1948”