Collect this beautiful etching by Marc Chagall titled “Judgment of Solomon” from the Bible series!
Details:
After Chagall completed his etchings for The Fables (1930), Vollard again offered Chagall a commission, this time for a set of etchings illustrating themes from the Bible. Chagall went to Palestine to get a sense of the land itself. Returning to Paris, he began work on the 105 etchings for this project, first between 1931 and 1939 (when the first sixty-five etchings were executed and printed) and then between 1952 and 1956 (when the remaining forty etchings were completed and printed). Chagall truly drew upon his Jewish heritage and study of modern art to create these etchings. The work was one of the rare illustrated Bible publications from the 20th century. Meyer Schapiro, the noted art historian, observed that Chagall was the ideal artist to have undertaken the task of illustrating the Bible: "Chagall was prepared for this achievement by his permanent receptivity of mind. He is a rare modern painter whose art has been accessible to the full range of his emotions and thoughts. . . .He has represented themes of an older tradition not in a spirit of curiosity or artifice, but with a noble devotion.
Artist Bio:
Marc Chagall (1887 –1985) was a Russian-French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall was born in 1887 into a Jewish family near Vitebsk, today in Belarus, but at the time in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his ideas of Eastern European and Jewish folklore. He spent the wartime years in his native Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College. He later worked in and near Moscow in difficult conditions in a tough time in Russia, before leaving again for Paris in 1923. During World War II, he escaped occupied France to the United States, where he lived for 7 years in New York City before returning to France in 1948. Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century". According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's pre-eminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz as well as the Fraumünster in Zürich, windows for the UN and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". Yet throughout these phases of his style "he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk." "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is".
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