"From my earliest youth, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me, and still does, that it is the greatest source of poetry of all time."
Inaugural speech by Marc Chagall at the Musée de Nice, July 7th, 1973.
In 1930, the great art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard asked Marc...
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"From my earliest youth, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me, and still does, that it is the greatest source of poetry of all time."
Inaugural speech by Marc Chagall at the Musée de Nice, July 7th, 1973.
In 1930, the great art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard asked Marc Chagall to create a hundred etchings to illustrate the Bible. Shortly afterwards, in 1931, the painter was invited to Palestine.
He was fascinated by the beauty of the biblical sites and rediscovered the traditions of the Eastern European Jews, whom he had left behind at the same time as his Vitebsk shtetl.
In the space of a year, he produced 40 gouaches illustrating Genesis and Exodus, which served as the starting point for the engravings for the illustrated Bible commissioned by Vollard.
He painted the Patriarchs, Moses, kings and prophets with fervor and poetry, and this set of gouaches forms a particularly moving first step in Chagall's evolution towards sacred art, which was to develop masterfully with the biblical cycles of the 1950s.
This catalog explores the importance of the Bible in Chagall's work, and situates him in the vast movement to revive sacred art, led in particular by Father Couturier. Accompanied by a note, it presents all the gouaches, newly restored with an incredible burst of color.
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