L'Aube
Marc Chagall
1969
Original color lithograph 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.
Catalog 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 characters seem to float in a weightless world. Acrobats, musicians and animals unfurl as if in a marvellous child's dream.