AMSTERDAM — When Marc Chagall received the prestigious commission to paint the ceiling of the Palais Garnier opera house in 1960, the anti-Semitic protests and threats against him were so vicious that he had to be accompanied to the Paris theater by a police escort, recalled Paul Versteeg, a Dutch artist who worked with him.

Chagall, born Moishe Segal, was a Belarusian Jew who had fled Vitebsk for Paris a half-century earlier, at age 20. He was trying to leave behind Russia’s discrimination against Jews and the periodic violent pogroms, trading them for the center of the art world.

“It was as if I was discovering light, color, freedom, the sun, pleasure in life for the first time,” he said of his early days in Paris.

Even though Chagall immediately became one of the leading modernist painters, he continued to face difficulties in the French capital. When the Vichy government came to power in 1940, Jewish artists could no longer exhibit in Paris. Even in the 1960s, many French critics still regarded him as no more than a “foreign Jew” who should not be able to paint a national monument, said Maurice Rummens , a research assistant at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.