Printer: Mourlot (1 of 5,000 Editions)

Dimensions: 78 x 51 cm 

Condition: Very good condition

Frame: Due to be framed in charcoal

Description: By the early 1970s, Marc Chagall was one of the world’s most admired living artists, yet his paintings retained the imagination and sense of wonder that had defined his work from the very beginning. This original lithographic poster was published for his 1972 exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris, with whom he enjoyed a long and productive relationship.

The image reproduced here, Le Peintre devant le Visage Bleu (The Painter Before the Blue Face), is unmistakably Chagall. A painter stands before his easel while a mysterious blue profile, flowers and floating figures create a world that feels suspended somewhere between memory and imagination. Rather than telling a single story, Chagall invites the viewer to discover their own.

Galerie Maeght played an important role in presenting Chagall’s work to post war audiences, and many of his finest exhibition posters were produced during their long association. This poster reflects the confidence and freedom of Chagall’s later years and remains a wonderful example of the close relationship between artist, gallery and the great French tradition of artistic lithography.

Artist: Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a Russian-French-Jewish painter, book illustrator, ceramicist, stage-set designer, tapestry maker and undoubtedly one of the most influential modern artists of the 20^th century. He was also an unparalleled colourist. In 1954, Picasso said, ‘When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter alive who understands what colour really is.’

Most artists would begin the lithograph process with a black outline and then load subsequent plates with several colours to produce a clean coloured image. But Chagall would pour layer upon layer of colour into plates to create lithographs so dense in paint that they resembled paintings.

In 1948, Chagall, aged 61, was an internationally successful artist. He had lived through two world wars, the Russian Revolution and witnessed constant persecution of Jewish people. He had escaped occupied France with his family to live in New York during World War II but had returned to Paris a widower and in search of new beginnings. He teamed up with Charles Sorlier, one of the master lithographers at Mourlot studios and began to experiment. Chagall wrote several years later in 1960: ‘When I held a lithographic stone or a copperplate in my hand I thought I was touching a talisman. It seemed to me that I could put all my joys and sorrow in it…Everything that touched my life through the years, births, deaths, weddings, flowers, animals, birds, the poor workers, my parents, lovers in the night, the biblical prophets on the street at home, in the temple and in heaven. And as I grew older, the tragedy of life within us and around us.’

Chagall worked right up until his death in France in 1985, aged 97. He was the last surviving master of European Modernism.