Marc Chagall 1887 - 1985
One of the best-known and most beloved artists of the 20th Century, Marc Chagall’s visionary work has entranced audiences for decades. The Paragon Gallery is truly honoured to announce the arrival of a stunning overview of his graphic work that will be on display between Friday 12th July until Saturday 10th August, opening with a Private View Evening on Thursday 11th July from 5.30 - 8pm.
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Viewers will find some of the most enduring and poetic images of modern art depicted in an array of techniques, from etching to lithography. The collection will include examples from the artist’s greatest bodies of original prints.
Born in 1887 in Russia, he studied in St Petersburg and then went to Paris where he befriended the avant-garde circle of artists. Chagall travelled extensively throughout Europe before escaping to the United States at the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1917 he returned to his native Vitebsk where he was made Director and Commissar of Fine Art. However, his fantasy-based work irked the conservative authorities so he left for Moscow to design for the new Jewish Theatre. Returning to Paris in 1923 he met the art-dealer Vollard for whom he illustrated Gogol’s Dead Souls and the Fables of La Fontaine. Between 1941-47 he moved between occupied France and the USA, eventually settling near Nice.
Settling permanently in Paris in 1948, he exhibited at the Louvre and undertook a series of major commissions for the United Nations, the Paris Opera, the cathedral in Metz and the Hadassah University Medical Centre in Jerusalem.
Chagall was a prolific artist, his work reminiscent of Jewish life, bible stories and of the folklore from his early years in Russia. He preferred to compose his images based upon emotional and poetic associations rather than rules of pictorial logic and drew extensively from folk art and his Jewish heritage. Chagall died in 1985 at the age of 97.
“When Matisse dies”, declared Picasso,“Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.”
Lithograph
Suite: The Odyssey of Homer
Unsigned
Edition of 250
Paper size: 32.5 x 44cm
£2000 Framed
Marc Chagall’s Odyssey of Homer portfolio is a tribute to Homer’s epic poem and illustrates the main stages of the text. Chagall visited Greece twice – in 1952 and 1954 – and it was from these visits that he drew much of his inspiration from the ancient mythological motifs. The lithographs were published and printed by Fernand Mourlot in Paris and some of the images required as many as 20 layers of colour.