One of Liege's main claims to fame is the writer Simenon, whose Maigret would be well at home in this down-at-heel city.
Despite some recent impressive, but incomplete, attempts to improve the city centre, the streets and alleys of Belgium's main Francophone city bear the hallmarks of the region's industrial decline and it's easy to imagine the great detective propping up one of its many little, old-fashioned bars.
There's even an Hotel Simenon, with bedrooms decorated with memorabilia, and nearby the church of St Pholien, where a corpse was found hanging from a gargoyle in Maigret and the Hundred Gibbets.
In trying to change its image and bring tourists to the city, the council has been involved in a number of major exhibitions - Monet brought in some 220,000 in 1992, and Gauguin 150,000 two years later. Now a major, and magnificent, retrospective on Marc Chagall, organised jointly with the German town of Balingen, has hundreds arriving even on a Tuesday morning at the Salle Saint-Georges.
Despite the grimness of the exhibition space - a cold, cavernous room of concrete and steel - Chagall's colours, particularly the bold reds and blues, leap off the canvasses.
The city itself owns one of his most dramatic pictures, La Maison Bleue, an inspired, cheap purchase in 1939 at a sale in Lucerne of "degenerate art" seized by the Nazis from their museums. The Nazi objections had more to do with Chagall's Jewish roots than with the haunting quality of this picture, a 1920 farewell by the artist to his beloved childhood home in the Jewish community of Vitebsk, in Belarus.
In the foreground, a ramshackle, blue log-cabin, whose cubist-influenced construction defies the laws of science, has the vibrancy of colour of a Van Gogh. In the background, more conventionally, a river and the city with its bourgeois homes and churches - the powerful affection for his rural roots dominates the picture and would often recur in his work.
Even in the 1980s, after a lifetime of multiple exiles, he would return in his work to the simplicities and certainties of childhood and rural Jewish religious and cultural traditions.
It was an extraordinary life, buffeted by the great events and tragedies of the century, yet there is both a endearing naivety and optimism which shines through the symbolism in his work, even some of the darkest.
From St Petersburg, where he learned his craft and was exposed first to art nouveau, the 23-year-old Chagall went in 1910 to Paris, where he was inspired by fauvism's use of colours. Yet most of his themes were drawn from home. As his work became known he was exhibited, giving him the opportunity to travel and he returned in 1914 to Vitebsk and to the woman who became his great love, Bella.
One of the exhibition's canvases, Above the Town, celebrates their love, with the happy couple floating like a cloud over rooftops, an image he would return to often. Caught up in the revolution in 1917, he accepted Lunacharsky's offer of becoming Vitebsk's own commissar for culture, although he would admit that all he knew of Marx was that he was Jewish and had a white beard.
In Moscow he discovered theatre, working as he would later on backdrops for major productions. Later still he produced the magnificent ceiling for the Paris Opera, a rough sketch of which can be seen in Liege.
Chagall was no conformist and would soon be in exile again, back in Paris where he did his first work as an illustrator. In his painting La Promenade, he again celebrates his love for Bella, the couple intertwined, she upside down. The pair blend into each other seamlessly.
Then came darker pictures as he reflected on the rise of fascism and the Spanish civil war. Themes of martyrdom and broken hopes abound. In La Revolution, a work from 1937, the horrors to come seem to be foreshadowed.
In Between Dog and Wolf, despair seems to overcome him. Against a grey streetscape an artist stands with a blank pallet. Hope seems only to be represented in the merging of the artist's face with that of a woman. Bella?
Finally, as late as 1941, he was persuaded by a US diplomat that his life was no longer safe and they emigrate to New York. After the war, Chagall returned to France, and then was drawn like so many artists to the brilliant light of the Mediterranean and the hill town of Vence, where he settled - although without Bella, whose tragic death crushed him.
Chagall would paint and exhibit until shortly before his death in 1985 aged 98. Liege has made a worthy tribute to an artist who spanned the century.
