As a center of cosmopolitan culture and a symbol of modernity, Paris held a magnetic attraction for artists from Eastern Europe during the early decades of the 20th century. Many had to flee persecution and pogroms. They settled around Montparnasse, which was sprinkled with cafes, and art galleries.
It was here that Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Moïse Kisling, Jacques Lipchitz, Louis Marcoussis, Amedeo Modigliani, Chana Orloff, Jules Pascin, Margit Pogany, Chaim Soutine, and Ossip Zadkine established studios and discovered each other’s work.
The ARTKABINETT art collector social network enjoys strolling the Montparnasse galleries, bookshops, and cinemas.
A Philadelphis exhibition will include around 40 paintings and sculptures by these émigrés, whose work was both imbued with the spirit of modernism and informed by their own cultural heritage. The exhibition will focus in particular on the paintings Chagall made between 1910 and 1920, including Half Past Three (The Poet ), of 1911, one of the treasures of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
"Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle", which highlights an exceptional strength of the museum’s holdings of early modern art, is presented in conjunction with a new international arts festival in Philadelphia that is being organized by the city’s Kimmel Center and will run from April 7 to May 1, 2011. 
“Paris Through the Window: Marc Chagall and His Circle represents the Museum’s contribution to this festival and will focus on the powerful influence that Paris had on Chagall and his contemporaries,” said Timothy Rub, the George D. Widener Director and CEO of the Museum.
The curator of the exhibition, Michael R. Taylor, the Muriel and Philip Berman Curator of Modern Art at the Museum, continued:
“This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to reconsider the cross-fertilization of ideas that took place in the French capital during the 1910s and 1920s, which was one of the most experimental and creative periods in Western art.”
The exhibition will be largely drawn from the Museum’s outstanding collection of modern painting and sculpture, but this will be supplemented with a handful of key loans from museums and private collections in the United States and Europe. 
These include one of Chagall’s most famous works, the early masterpiece Paris Through the Window, of 1913, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, which presents a kaleidoscopic impression of the city of Paris as seen from Chagall’s studio window at La Ruche.
The deployment of strong, non-naturalistic color in this painting reveals the influence of Chagall’s friend Robert Delaunay, who developed a more colorful and poetic variant of Cubism known as Orphism.
The motif of the Eiffel Tower (top left), which dominates the background of Paris Through the Window, was also a central feature of Delaunay’s work at this time, although the Janus-headed man and the sphinx-like cat in the foreground belong to Chagall’s imagination alone and imbues the work with a dream-like otherworldliness.
Another important loan to the exhibition is the 1915 painting The Poet Reclining (below left) from the Tate Modern in London, which belongs to the same series of euphoric poet paintings as Half-Past Three (The Poet), which Chagall made four years earlier. 
In his first years in Paris, the artist counted among his closest friends the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, both of whom wrote eloquently about his work, and these delightfully tumultuous paintings address the themes of poetic reverie, fantasy and inspiration that also characterized his own approach to art-making.
