A Harmony of Line: Selections from the School of Paris
AP 2011
Marc Chagall was born in Belarus and studied art in Saint Petersburg before moving to Paris in 1910. Settling in Montmartre, he took a studio in a rundown building known as La Ruche (The Hive), where his neighbors included the painter Modigliani. Chagall had suffered discrimination in Saint Petersburg as a Jew, but was welcomed back to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He returned, however, to Paris—via Berlin—in 1923. It was in Berlin that Chagall took up etching, and he received commissions in Paris to make book illustrations for the dealer Ambroise Vollard. This etching, and the two others that hang nearby, are from a 1927 illustrated edition of The Dead Souls by the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Nikolai Gogol. The humor and absurdist exuberance of the epic poem are conveyed in this caricature of the book’s protagonist, the rascal Tchitchikov.
Last Updated: 2/8/2013