La Tour Eiffel, from the VVV portfolio

Notes

The present lot includes one etching on paper from a portfolio of five etchings (one with aquatint), three duplicated drawings (two watercolor on paper and one crayon on paper), one collage, one engraving, and one gelatin silver print. Published by VVV, New York.

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal to a Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russia (now in Belarus). Chagall studied painting in Vitebsk and, in 1907, he went to St Petersburg, where he studied intermittently for three years, including under the stage designer Léon Bakst. In 1910, he moved to Paris, where he lived in La Ruche and was exposed to avant-garde poets and numerous art movements, including Expressionism, Fauvism, Impressionism, Cubism, and Abstraction. The four years spent in Paris would have a lasting influence on his work.

During World War I, he moved back to Vitebsk and then on to Moscow, before leaving Russia for good in 1922. He went to Berlin, where he learned engraving techniques, before settling in Paris. He spent time in the United States of America during World War II and eventually returned to France in 1948, where he continued to produce prolifically for the rest of his life.

Known as one of the masters of European Modernism, Chagall worked in several media, including painting, drawing, and printmaking. In his later years, he also designed stage sets, worked in stained glass and illustrated books. Chagall was one of the major innovators of the 20th century School of Paris. He created richly coloured, poetic, dream-like, and often whimsical images using repetitive motifs of flying lovers, massive bouquets of flowers, fiddlers on roofs, and fantastical animals.

Chagall exhibited extensively throughout his lifetime and was recognised by a retrospective exhibition of his work held at the Louvre in Paris in 1977.