Marc Chagall

(1887 - 1985)               [

1921

Marcel Arland

Maternité

[Motherhood]

Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1926

215 x 160 mm. 96 pages 

Edition: 960. Copy nr. 670

From summer 1922 to autumn 1923 Chagall stayed in Berlin. The publisher Cassirer planned to publish Chagall’s My Life and asked the artist to execute some etchings. These were the first prints Chagall produced. As he had written the memoirs himself, the illustrations were additions in complete harmony with the text. Soon after his arrival in Paris in 1923, Chagall, at the request of the famous art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard, started his cycle of etchings for Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. In 1925 he finished this cycle that eventually was printed in 1948. For the novel Motherhood by his Friend Marcel Arland, Chagall designed 5 etchings. The style of these etching resemble those of My life and Dead souls but they are more soft and harmonious in their expression. Like the scenes from My life, the etchings for Motherhood accompany the rural atmosphere of the novel. Although the etchings are closely related to the drawings Chagall made earlier, he always stressed that the stroke in drawing was fundamentally different from the stroke in etching. Because of the resistive material, the artist had to force his will on the stroke. Etching gave Chagall an expressive impulse that favoured the painterly dimension of his later illustrative cycles of lithographs.    

References:

Meyer 1963, B 95