Marc Chagall (1887-1985) French, Framed Abstract Modern Color Lithograph. Title: "Le coq et la Tour Eiffel." Originally painted in 1952. Signature in print bottom right. 

Overall Size: 18 1/4 x 15 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 11 x 8 1/2 in. 

#5242  

Marc Chagall was born Moishe Shagal in July 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia. Sheltered by the Jewish commandment against graven images, his first introduction to art was seeing a schoolmate copy a magazine illustration. In 1906 he went to St. Petersburg where he was exposed to Russian iconography and folk art, but briefly imprisoned as a Jew without a work permit. Returning to Vitebsk, he married Bella Rosenfeld, a rich intellectual, and was made commissar for the arts, establishing an art school and expanding the culture of the city. In 1910 a patron sponsored a trip to Paris, France, where he adopted his new name to fit in with the other artists. Chagall came to reject cubism, fauvism and futurism, but lived in a studio near Montparnasse in a twelve-sided wooden structure divided into wedge-shaped rooms, where he met other artists and constantly exchanged ideas between them, rapidly becoming known as one of the fathers of surrealism. His family officially assumed French citizenship in 1937, but when France fell to the Nazis his friend Varian Fry rescued him from a Gestapo roundup of Jews in Marseille and packed him, his family and 3500 lbs. of his art works on board a transatlantic ship. Bella died of a viral infection in 1944 in upstate New York, and three years later when he returned to France he began an affair with a married English woman named Virginia Haggard MacNeil, producing a son. Seven years later he met a Russian milliner in London named Valentine Brodsky, who became his muse for the rest of his life. Chagall created works in nearly every artistic medium, including sets for plays and ballets, biblical etchings, and stained-glass windows. He opened a studio and lived in it in Vence, France until he died there in March 1985. At the time, he owed nearly $30 million in inheritance taxes to the French government, and his daughter was able to pay most of it with his artwork.