We are actively seeking to acquire works by Marc Chagall.

“I whiled away my days at the Place de la Concorde or round the Jardin du Luxembourg, plucking leaves and looking at Danton and Watteau.  Oh!  If only, astride the stone chimera of Notre Dame, I could forge a pathway across the heavens.  Paris, to me you are a second Vitebsk!” –Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born in Belarus, on the 7th of July 1887. Although born in Belarus, he was also considered a French painter, draughtsman, printmaker, designer, sculptor, ceramicist and writer. A prolific artist, Chagall excelled in the European tradition of subject painting and distinguished himself as an expressive colourist. His work is noted for its consistent use of folkloric imagery and its sweetness of colour.

Chagall went to St Petersburg in 1907 where he entered a minor art school, at the same time working as a sign painter.  Throughout his work the foundations of Russian art and the sign painter’s technique were evident.  Though he preferred to be known as a Belarussian artist, following his exile from the Soviet Union in 1923, Chagall was recognized as a major figure of the École de Paris, especially in the later 1920s and the 1930s.  He was associated with the avant-garde circle of Delaunay, Modigliani, and Chaim Soutine.  His childlike figures and objects distorted in scale and often floating upside down in space, influenced on the surrealists.

During World War II Chagall lived in the USA, where he designed ballet sets and costumes and subsequently worked on mosaics and tapestries for the Israeli Knesset building (1966).  Other achievements included the costumes and decor for Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1945), stained-glass windows, and murals.  Marc Chagall returned to France after the war, and along with Picasso, was the only painter to have an exhibition at the Louvre during his lifetime.  Chagall died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Alpes-Maritimes, on the 28th of March 1985.

The artist chose lithography as a print medium to explore his mystical world of lovers, musicians and artists.  Working directly on the printing plate, Chagall’s spontaneity of brushstrokes, drawn lines, and lush colour resulted in the some of the twentieth centuries most highly sought after lithographs.

Literature:
Gauss, Ulrike, Ed.  “Marc Chagall: The Lithographs. The Sorlier Collection.  A Catalogue Raisonné.”  New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998.  Pg. 278.
Sorlier, Charles.  “The Lithographs of Chagall: 1969-1973.”  New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1974.  Pgs. 58-59.

Odon Wagner Gallery, Toronto, Canada