Chagall, Marc, L’Aube, 1969
1969
Original lithograph in color on Arches paper
41.5 x 47.9 cm.
Annotated "H.C." lower left, signed by the artist in pencil lower right
Maeght éditeur, Paris.
Catalogue raisonné : Sorlier 575
“From my earliest youth, when I first began to use a pencil, I sought that something that could spread like a great river pouring towards distant and alluring shores. Holding a lithographic stone or a copper plate, I thought I was touching a talisman. In them, it seemed, I could place all my sorrows, all my joys…”. Chagall and Tériade, L’Empreinte d’un peintre.
The oversized bouquet, the lithograph’s central figure, invades the composition, where the figures seem to float in a weightless world. Acrobats, musicians and animals unfurl as if in a marvellous children’s dream.
About the author
Marc Chagall (1887-1985)
Of Russian origin, born into a very religious Jewish family with a strong attachment to folklore, Marc Chagall is one of those great figures of twentieth-century art who forged a highly personal body of work. He fashioned a poetic, ethereal space, often highly colored, inhabited by recurring symbolic motifs – the rooster, the donkey, the couple, the moon, bouquets and angels in particular. In 1964, André Malraux commissioned him to paint the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris.
