The Museum of Modern Art featured a major retrospective of the career of this popular Russian-French artist who was living at this time, like many refugees from Hitler's Europe, in New York. He was already famous for his surreal renderings of Russian Jewish peasant life and was among the most popular of the modernists at this time. In its review, Time crowned him as "one of the most important living painters."
Carlyle Burrows in the Sunday Herald Tribune wrote that this was “one of those shows" that the Museum "does so well for all the artists it is keenly interested in—a really comprehensive one-man show.” It included 62 oil paintings as well as graphic works, including the artist's designs for the ballet. The critics were laudatory, although Robert Coates in The New Yorker wrote that he thought Chagall, like many successful artists, had become locked by their success into a formula by his dealers and public demand. The works in the show from the earliest periods showed Chagall experimenting interestingly with a number of styles and subject matters before becoming "the painter of gently amorous fantasies....floating picturesquely against a Russian village background," Coates wrote. The critic, however, felt that the authority and mastery that the artist had come to develop in this genre eventually compensated for the loss of variety.
The Time review and profile noted that Chagall had chosen to work in a primitive style, because, in his word, Primitive Art "already had a technical perfection toward which the present generation is striving, now playing tricks of sleight of hand, now falling into stylization. I compare this formal baggage to the Pope of Rome sumptuously vested beside Christ naked, or to the lavishly decorated church beside prayer in the open fields." Edward Alden Jewell of The New York Times wrote that Chagall had been distinctive from the start of his career.
Chagall had taken refuge in New York and exhibited with other exile artists in New York during the war years while working and living first in the Adirondacks and then the Catskills. Burrows wrote that “has been almost as vividly before the public here for several years as formerly he was in Paris.” When his wife and soul mate, Bella, died of a viral infection in 1944, he was unable to work for nine months. He was about to have a postwar resurgence with several major international shows.
The Museum of Modern Art had opened in 1929, achieved great success in the 1930s with major Van Gogh and Picasso exhibits and moved to its current address in 1939 with an opening celebration attended by 6,000 eminent New Yorkers. In 1946 Nelson Rockefeller was president of the museum, which his mother Abby Rockefeller had founded with two friends. His father had donated the land and provided generous funding, although not himself a fan of modern art. By 1946 it had challenged the august, staid Metropolitan as the city's preeminent art institution.