?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 18,000 - $ 22,000
MARC CHAGALL L'Âme du Cirque.
Color lithograph, 1980. 595x940 mm; 23 1/2x37 inches, full margins. Signed and numbered 17/50 in pencil, lower margin. Printed by Mourlot, Paris. Published by Maeght, Paris. A very good impression of this large lithograph with strong colors.
Chagall (1887-1985) held an avid interest in the circus throughout his career and often represented circus scenes in some of his most important printed and painted works. According to one of his biographers, "For [Chagall], clowns and acrobats always resembled figures in religious paintings . . . The evolution of the circus works . . . reflects a gradual clouding of his worldview, and the circus performers now gave way to the prophet or sage in his work—a figure into whom Chagall poured his anxiety as Europe darkened, and he could no longer rely on the lumiére-liberté of France for inspiration," (Wullschlager, Chagall: A Biography, New York, 2008, page 337). Chagall himself posed the following question concerning the circus, "Why am I so touched by their makeup and grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons . . . Chaplin seeks to do in film what I am trying to do in my paintings. He is perhaps the only artist today I could get along with without having to say a single word." Mourlot 982.
