An exhibition dedicated to the career of Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall is to open in Liverpool next month.

Fifteen years after the last major retrospective of his work in the UK, and 27 years after his death at the age of 97, Tate Liverpool is to remind art-lovers of the modernist painter's genius.

Among the 70 paintings displayed will be self-portraits, the series of large murals the artist completed in 1920 for Moscow's State Yiddish Chamber Theatre, as well as examples of his magical, dream-like scenes of Jewish life in the shtetl. The exhibition will concentrate in particular on his early development as a painter in the burgeoning avant-garde movement.

Born into a religious family, the son of a herring merchant, Moishe Shagall (as he was known) grew up in what is now Belarus, in the Pale of Settlement.

He left home to study art in St Petersburg at the age of 20, then moved to Paris. He returned to Russia and was forced to stay there during the First World War, and later sought refuge in the United States during the Holocaust.

Much of his work contained Jewish themes, including his famous Jerusalem Windows, at the Hadassah hospital in Israel, which depict the time when Jacob blessed his sons and they saw visions of the future.