Marc Chagall

MARC CHAGALL (Vitebsk, Belarus, 1887 – Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 1985)
"The Bird-Painter," "The Man in Prayer," and "Jacob’s Ladder," 1977.
Two color lithographs from “Derrière le miroir, No. 225.”
Maeght éditeur, Paris, October 1977.
Measurements: 38 x 28 cm.

These works are from issue no. 225 of *Derrière le miroir*, a publication edited by Maeght in October 1977 on the occasion of an exhibition of 39 gouaches and wash drawings by Marc Chagall at the Galerie Maeght. The issue included an original full-page color lithograph, printed by Mourlot, and various color and black-and-white reproductions of the works featured in the exhibition.

The images capture some of the most characteristic motifs of Chagall’s late work: the painter transformed into a bird, the man in prayer, and Jacob’s ladder. In these works, the themes of artistic creation, spirituality, the biblical world, and popular memory reappear, treated with the narrative freedom and poetic intensity characteristic of the artist.

These pieces retain their significance due to their direct connection to the 1977 exhibition and to Chagall’s mature imagination, where dreams, religion, music, the people, and memory intertwine in a deeply personal iconography.

Marc Chagall was one of the key figures in 20th-century art. Trained in Vitebsk, St. Petersburg, and Paris, he developed a highly personal artistic language that integrated elements of Cubism, Fauvism, Symbolism, and the Eastern European Jewish tradition.

His work is represented in institutions such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid, the Musée National Marc Chagall in Nice, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, among many others.