Chagall, by Raymond Cogniat. [Paris]: Flammarion, [1965?]. French.
Monograph on Marc Chagall, accompanied by dozens of reproductions of his works. On the first page is a large illustration in color pencils, made by Chagall, with an inscription in his handwriting: "Pour Edith et Maurice Schlogel, en souvenir, Marc Chagall" [To Edith and Maurice Schlogel, a souvenir, Marc Chagall]. Dated 1966.
Marc Chagall (1887-1985), a Russian-French artist, is considered by many the greatest Jewish modern painter. Chagall was born to a Hassidic family in Liozna (then in Belarus), the eldest of nine siblings. When his mother asked his first art teacher, the painter Yehuda Pen, whether her son could earn a living from painting, Pen looked at Chagall's sketches and told her: "Yes, he has some ability". At the age of twenty, he was accepted to study art in St. Petersburg (during this period, he painted for the first time the figure of the Fiddler on the Roof, after which the famous musical is named) and in 1914 married the writer Bella Rosenfeld, who became known as one of his greatest sources of inspiration. After the October Revolution, Chagall was appointed commissar of arts for the Vitebsk district, where he established an art school and a museum. Among the teachers of the school were the artist El Lissitzky and the painter Yehuda Pen – Chagall's first teacher.
In 1920, Chagall moved to Western Europe and after a short stay in Berlin settled in Paris. During this period, he created the important series "My Life", which documented the views of the Jewish town, and the series of bible illustrations. In 1941, about two years after the occupation of France by Nazi Germany, Chagall succeeded in escaping to the USA with the assistance of the American journalist Varian Fry. For several years he lived in New York, returning to France after the war, where he remained until his death.
Chagall's works of art, which embrace a wide variety of fields and styles (prints, theater sets and costumes, sculpture and ceramics, tapestry, mosaics, stained glass, and more), are exhibited in leading museums and galleries, in the opera houses of New York and Paris, in the Mainz Cathedral, in the Knesset (in The Chagall Lounge) and elsewhere. The painter Pablo Picasso said of his work: "When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is".
95, [1] pp, approx. 28 cm. With original dust-jacket. Good condition. Minor blemishes. A small tear to edge of dust-jacket.