Stock # A3019 - Marc Chagall "Couverture" 1963 Mourlot Print
"Couverture" by Marc Chagall
Unsigned Offset Lithograph printed in 1963.
Book page 67 in Chagall Lithographe II (1957-1962).
Reproduction of image from 1960.
‘Chagall Lithographe II' André Sauret, Paris, 1963.
Text in French by Fernand Mourlot.
The second of five catalogue raisonne of Chagall's lithographs.
Chagall Lithographe II was published in 1963 and covered the lithographs
of Chagall from 1957 through 1962.
Twelve lithographs were created by the artist specifically for this publication,
including six in color and six in black and white.
Edition sizes were not given, but it is generally believed that they exist in
impressions of two thousand or less.
Print is framed and matted under glass
Frame is solid wood
Print and mat are in excellent condition.
Frame shows some minimal wear.
Print is approximately 10.5" wide x 8.75" high
Frame is approximately 7.25" wide x 8.5" high x 0.5" deep
About the Artist
Marc Zakharovich Chagall born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal (6 July, 1887 – 28 March 1985)
Marc Zakharovich Chagall was a Russian-French artist of Belarusian Jewish origin.
An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every
artistic format, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.
Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century"
(though Chagall saw his work as "not the dream of one people but of all humanity").
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 preeminent Jewish artist".
Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz,
windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel.
He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
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 idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture.
He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and
a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.
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 colour really is".
Please see all photographs.