Marc Chagall
Vitebsk, floating lovers, fiddlers on roofs, and eighty years of the same remembered village.
Marc Chagall was born near Vitebsk in 1887 into a Hasidic Jewish family and left Russia for Paris in 1910, returning after the revolution to run an art school in his home town before leaving for good. He spent the rest of a very long life — he died in 1985, at ninety-seven — painting a remembered world of fiddlers, cattle, brides, roosters and lovers rising off the ground, and he did it through Cubism, Surrealism, exile in New York during the war, and a late career of monumental commissions: the Paris Opera ceiling, windows at Reims and Jerusalem, mosaics and tapestries.
Chagall is among the most forged artists of the twentieth century, and the Comite Chagall in Paris is the only body whose opinion carries weight — it can and does refuse works, and it has historically had the power to have forgeries destroyed. No painting should be bought or sold without addressing this. He was also one of the century's great printmakers: the Bible, Daphnis et Chloe and Les Ames mortes suites, catalogued by Cramer and Mourlot, run to thousands of impressions, and a valuation there turns on lifetime versus later printing, signed versus unsigned, and whether a sheet was removed from a book.
If you own a work by Marc Chagall
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.