Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited with text by Josef Helfenstein. Text by Simon Baier, Alfred Bodenheimer, Sophie Eichner, Thomas Grob, Heiko Haumann, Bettina Keller-Back, Shifra Kuperman, et al.
This catalog explores the early work of Marc Chagall (1887–1985), forged as the artist was pulled between two different worlds. The book begins with Chagall’s breakthrough years in Paris, 1911 to 1914, and the paintings in which he combined his memories of Russian folk art and provincial life with the cutting-edge stylistic experiments he was exposed to through his life in the center of the Parisian avant-garde.
When World War I broke out during a visit back home, Chagall was forced to spend the next eight years in Russia. The unexpected change of circumstances prompted a phase of searching self-scrutiny in the artist’s paintings and works on paper created in and after 1914.
This volume explores Chagall’s early work in Paris and Russia, presenting a period of rapid artistic evolution and personal as well as political upheaval in the artist’s life.
Published by Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Foreword by Meret Meyer. Text by Jean-Louis Prat, Ekaterina Selezneva, Angela Lampe, Ángeles Caso.
Marc Chagall is justly famed as one of modernism’s greatest colorists, and its most articulate painter of dispossession, exile and human joy. Chagall also uniquely reconciled the motifs and concerns of Jewish culture with his strange amalgam of Symbolism, Fauvism and Cubism. His lifespan encompassed two world wars, the October Revolution of 1917 and continual uprooting, with lengthy spells in Paris, Moscow and New York; although he painted the ravages of these wars and the sufferings of the Jewish people, and although his art is steeped in the melancholia of exile, it never ceased to affirm life and to praise it. This beautifully produced volume, with its abundance of color plates and first-rate scholarship, celebrates Chagall in all his diversity, reproducing paintings, book illustrations to the Bible and works by Gogol and La Fontaine, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and prints. These works are contextualized in essays by Chagall scholars Meret Meyer, Jean-Louis Prat, Ekaterina Selezneva, Angela Lampe and Ángeles Caso, and in an extensive chronology of the artist’s life, amply illustrated with photographs from his personal album. Marc Chagall (1887–1985) was born in Liozna, near Vitebsk, Belarus, a major center of Hassidic culture in the Russian empire. In 1906 he moved to St Petersburg, Russia, enrolling in art school before moving to Paris in 1910, where Apollinaire, Delaunay and Léger were among his earliest advocates. Chagall’s reputation began to grow during his Moscow years (1914–1922), but it was not until some five years after his return to Paris that his first major exhibitions took place. Two years into the Second World War, Chagall went into exile again, living in New York until 1948. The major triumph of his last decades was perhaps his ceiling for the Paris Opera (1963), which astounded both critics and the wider public.
PUBLISHER Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 9 x 11 in. / 328 pgs / 279 color / 42 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 8/31/2012 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: FALL 2012 p. 31
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9788415113195TRADE List Price: $85.00 CAD $112.50 GBP £75.00
Published by D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers. Artwork by Marc Chagall.
Lavishly produced using impeccable digital color separations and the finest printing, this catalogue raisonne of Chagall's lithographs documents 1050 works, each with complete identifying signature and edition information.