Printer: Mourlot

Dimensions: 30 x 25 cm 

Condition: Very good 

Frame: White

Description: Marc Chagall's celebrated ceiling for the Paris Opera House was unveiled on 23rd September 1964 during the finale of a symphony by Mozart, Chagall's favourite composer. Commissioned by France's Minister of Culture, André Malraux, the monumental work transformed the auditorium with a vibrant composition divided into richly coloured sections. Across the ceiling, Chagall brought together iconic scenes and characters from some of the world's most beloved operas and ballets, paying tribute to fourteen great composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Ravel, Berlioz and Wagner.

This wonderful original colour lithograph by Marc Chagall was created for Le Plafond de l'Opéra de Paris, the landmark publication documenting the conception and creation of the Paris Opera House ceiling. Richly illustrated, the book offered readers an insight into Chagall's vision and the artistic process behind one of the twentieth century's most celebrated public commissions and included six colour lithographs. This impression is one of 5,000 unsigned lithographs printed on fine smooth Vélin paper. Published in 1965 by Éditions André Sauret of Monte Carlo, both the book and the prints were produced by the renowned Mourlot Studios in Paris.

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.