Marc CHAGALL

Marc Chagall (1887–1985): Life, Colour Lithographs and Original Etchings

Few modern artists are as instantly recognisable as Marc Chagall (1887–1985). Lovers drifting above rooftops, green-faced fiddlers, goats, cockerels and the wooden houses of a Belarusian shtetl: from these motifs he built a dream world of his own, held together by colour of rare intensity. A leading figure of the School of Paris, he worked as a painter, etcher, lithographer, ceramicist, stage designer and maker of stained glass, and ranks among the finest book illustrators of the twentieth century.

At Galerie Le Coin des Arts in Paris, we offer a selection of Chagall’s original prints, chiefly colour lithographs and etchings, each chosen for the quality of the impression, its provenance and its condition.

The early years: from Vitebsk to St Petersburg

Moishe Shagal was born on 7 July 1887 at Liozna, near Vitebsk, in what was then the Russian Empire, the eldest child of a modest Hasidic family. In 1906 he enrolled at the Vitebsk studio of the painter Yehuda Pen, before moving on to St Petersburg, where he studied at the Zvantseva school under Léon Bakst. The shtetl, with its musicians, rituals, animals and timber houses, would remain his inexhaustible source of imagery.

Paris and La Ruche: Chagall finds his colour

Chagall reached Paris in 1911 and took a studio at La Ruche, the artists’ colony in Montparnasse. Fauvism and Cubism opened his eyes; Blaise Cendrars and Guillaume Apollinaire became his friends. Out of these encounters came a wholly personal idiom, in which Cubist structure is put at the service of saturated colour and storytelling: purple cows, figures upside down, villages floating in the sky. In 1914 Herwarth Walden gave him a solo show at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin.

War, revolution and Bella

A visit home to Vitebsk in the summer of 1914 turned into an eight-year stay, as war closed the borders. In 1915 he married Bella Rosenfeld, the muse behind his celebrated pairs of lovers. After the Revolution he became commissar for fine arts in Vitebsk and founded an art school there, bringing in El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich as teachers. In 1920 he painted the great murals for the State Jewish Theatre in Moscow.

Berlin, Vollard and the etched books

Chagall left Russia for good in 1922. In Berlin, Hermann Struck taught him etching, and Paul Cassirer published his first suite in 1923, Mein Leben (My Life), twenty etchings and drypoints. Back in Paris that same year, he was taken up by the dealer-publisher Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned three ambitious etched books: Gogol’s Dead Souls (96 plates), La Fontaine’s Fables (100 plates) and the Bible (105 plates), for which Chagall travelled to Palestine in 1931. Vollard’s death in 1939 halted the project; Tériade finally published the books after the war: Dead Souls in 1948, the Fables in 1952 and the Bible in 1956.

Exile, return and recognition in Britain

Naturalised French in 1937, Chagall was arrested in 1941 and escaped to New York with the help of Varian Fry. There he designed the sets and costumes for the ballets Aleko (1942) and The Firebird (1945), and made his first colour lithographs for Four Tales from the Arabian Nights (1948). Bella’s sudden death in 1944 left him devastated.

He came back to France in 1948, the year he won the printmaking prize at the Venice Biennale and the year London first saw his work in depth: the Tate Gallery held a Chagall exhibition in February 1948, after Paris and Amsterdam. The Tate collection today includes The Poet Reclining, painted in 1915. Settling on the Riviera, first at Vence and from 1966 at Saint-Paul-de-Vence, he married Valentina (Vava) Brodsky in 1952 and branched out into ceramics, sculpture, mosaic and tapestry.

Stained glass and great commissions, from Reims to Kent

From 1959 Chagall worked with the master glaziers of the Simon-Marq workshop in Reims on a long series of stained-glass windows: Metz Cathedral, the Hadassah synagogue in Jerusalem (1962), the United Nations in New York (1964), the Fraumünster in Zurich (1970) and Reims Cathedral (1974). England holds a remarkable share. At All Saints’ Church, Tudeley, in Kent, the east window, dedicated in 1967 in memory of Sarah d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, who died aged 21, was followed by eleven more, the last installed in 1985: it is the only church in the world whose windows are all by Chagall. In 1978 Chichester Cathedral unveiled his window on Psalm 150, commissioned by Dean Walter Hussey.

In 1964, at André Malraux’s invitation, he painted the new ceiling of the Paris Opéra (Palais Garnier), followed in 1966 by two vast murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1973 the Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice opened to house his Biblical Message. A major retrospective opened at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in January 1985, shortly before he died at Saint-Paul-de-Vence on 28 March 1985, aged ninety-seven.

Chagall’s colour lithographs

From 1950 Chagall worked in Paris at the Mourlot printing studio, where the chromiste Charles Sorlier became his closest collaborator. Lithography turned into one of his favourite media: drawing straight onto stone or zinc, he layered up to twenty colours to capture the luminosity of his canvases. Highlights include the forty-two plates of Daphnis and Chloe (Tériade, 1961), the Circus (Tériade, 1967) and the Odyssey, as well as the lithographs issued in Verve, Derrière le miroir and the Chagall Lithographe volumes.

Etchings and catalogues raisonnés

A born etcher, Chagall left a body of intaglio work dominated by the Vollard commissions. His etchings, often reworked with drypoint and aquatint, explore every shade of black, from velvety greys to glowing whites; certain plates of the Bible and the Fables also exist hand-coloured.

Any serious research starts with the catalogues raisonnés: Chagall Lithographe by Fernand Mourlot and later Charles Sorlier for the lithographs (cited as “Mourlot no.”), the Kornfeld catalogue for the etchings, and the Patrick Cramer catalogue for the illustrated books. His lithographic posters are also keenly collected.

Collecting Chagall: what to look for

Chagall is one of the most popular names in the print market, and one where care is essential. Genuine original lithographs, drawn by the artist himself, must not be confused with lithographs “after” Chagall, translated by Charles Sorlier or other craftsmen from his paintings and gouaches. Some of these are pencil-signed, but they carry neither the value nor the standing of his own prints. Reproductions and outright fakes are also common.

Before buying a Chagall lithograph or etching, check the technique, the print run and the justification (numbered impression, artist’s proof, hors commerce), the pencil signature, the Mourlot-Sorlier or Kornfeld reference, the publisher and printer, whether the sheet comes from a book, a suite or a review such as Verve or Derrière le miroir, and finally provenance and condition. Bear in mind that a plate from a book or review can be a perfectly original print without being signed.

At Galerie Le Coin des Arts, every Chagall print is selected for its authenticity, provenance and condition, and we are happy to advise collectors on their choice, on framing and on conservation. You may also enjoy the work of his contemporaries in our collection, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Joan Miró and Fernand Léger.

Sources and further reading

Musée national Marc Chagall, Nice · Tate, London · Chichester Cathedral · Fernand Mourlot and Charles Sorlier, Chagall Lithographe, 6 vols, Sauret, 1960–1986 · Patrick Cramer, Marc Chagall. Catalogue raisonné des livres illustrés, Patrick Cramer, 1995 · Museum of Modern Art, Mein Leben (1923).