Musee Des Beaux Arts, Reims 1960,Orginal Chagall Poster

Chagall designed this poster with Mourlot’s master printer, Charles Sorlier, for an exhibition at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Reims, France. It was about his stained-glass windows at the Cathedral in Metz.

Artist: Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a Russian-French-Jewish painter, book illustrator, ceramicist, stage-set designer, tapestry maker and undoubtedly one of the most influential modern artists of the 20th century. He was also an unparalleled colourist. In 1954, Picasso said, ‘When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter alive who understands what colour really is.’

Most artists would begin the lithograph process with a black outline and then load subsequent plates with several colours to produce a clean coloured image. But Chagall would pour layer upon layer of colour into plates to create lithographs so dense in paint that they resembled paintings.

In 1948, Chagall, aged 61, was an internationally successful artist. He had lived through two world wars, the Russian Revolution and witnessed constant persecution of Jewish people. He had escaped occupied France with his family to live in New York during World War II but had returned to Paris a widower and in search of new beginnings. He teamed up with Charles Sorlier, one of the master lithographers at Mourlot studios and began to experiment. Chagall wrote several years later in 1960: ‘When I held a lithographic stone or a copperplate in my hand I thought I was touching a talisman. It seemed to me that I could put all my joys and sorrow in it…Everything that touched my life through the years, births, deaths, weddings, flowers, animals, birds, the poor workers, my parents, lovers in the night, the biblical prophets on the street at home, in the temple and in heaven. And as I grew older, the tragedy of life within us and around us.’

Chagall worked right up until his death in France in 1985, aged 97. He was the last surviving master of European Modernism.