Marc Chagall

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist in the 1940s)
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1981)
Thence by descent

This work is in excellent condition. Canvas is not lined. The surface is clean and the pigments are fresh. Under UV light: one small dot of retouching visible at center right. This work is sold unframed.
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Marc Chagall’s Crucifixion comes from a series of works surrounding this theme completed between 1938 and 1948. The first in this series, White Crucifixion (see fig. 1) was exhibited at Galerie Mai in Paris in 1940; a little less than a year later Chagall and his family would flee Europe for the United States, landing in New York in 1941 where they would be met at the dock by Pierre Matisse, the youngest son of the artist Henri Matisse. Just five months later Chagall would have his first dedicated exhibition at Pierre Matisse Gallery. Matisse had first dreamed of exhibiting Chagall’s work while working at Galerie Barbazanges in Paris while the artist was exhibiting in 1924. Matisse fell in love with Chagall's imagery and commented in a letter to Jean Leymarie on March 11, 1977 that he would have loved nothing better than to show these works in New York. Later in the same letter he wrote: “In June 1941, with the exodus, Chagall arrived in New York where he settled in September… An exhibition was immediately planned for next December and my dream came true” (quoted in Pierre Matisse and His Artists (exhibition catalogue), The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, 2002, p. 189, translated from the French).

“Chagall made more than twenty-five major and minor works, finished paintings and studies, depicting the Crucifixion. The Jewish artist had obviously found in the Christian savior his ideal protagonist for the terrible times through which he, his fellow Jews, and much of Western humanity were now passing: ‘For me,’ Chagall said years later, ‘Christ has always symbolized the true type of the Jewish martyr'" (Susan Tumarkin Goodman & Kenneth E. Silver, Chagall. Love, War and Exile (exhibition catalogue), The Jewish Museum, New York, 2013-14, pp. 103-04). Indeed, “As in Christian Crucifixions, Jesus Christ is the epicenter of unrelenting violence, but here the surrounding details present a narrative unique to Chagall: ‘The scenes that frame the cross… from the shattered village to the pillaged, burning synagogue,’ in the words of Chagall’s son-in-law, Franz Meyer, ‘constitute an exemplary Jewish martyrology.’ Desperate refugees fill a crude wooden boat, a man flees with a Torah, a mother clutches her child to her breast” (ibid., p. 103). The present work was acquired directly from the artist by the Pierre Matisse gallery, from whom, in turn, the family of the present owner acquired it.