Marc Chagall - Carmen - image-1

Lot 332 Dα

Marc Chagall - Carmen

Auction 1059 - overview Cologne
27.11.2015, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 25.000 € - 30.000 €
Result: 52.080 € (incl. premium)

Marc Chagall

Carmen
1967

Colour lithograph on wove paper with watermark "Arches" 100.5 x 65.3 cm (101.8 x 66.5 cm) Framed under glass. Signed and numbered. Proof 175/200. The first state of this motif was used for a poster of the Metropolitan Opera, New York. The extended motif of the second state was only published within the present edition of 200. Printed by Mourlot, Paris 1967. - Minimally browned.

Parallel to Chagall's stage set, costume and poster designs for the Mozart opera “Zauberflöte”, he additionally created the poster for Georges Bizet's opera “Carmen”, which was also presented in 1967 to mark the occasion of the New York Metropolitan Opera's reopening. The poster's motif is a detail adopted from the design sketch for “The Triumph of Music”, one of the large wall paintings that the artist had created for the opera house. Chagall spent several months reworking the motif - the original is only 25 cm in height - before developing the composition that satisfied him for the large-format poster. Its remarkable optical presence is the result of the intense colourfulness, which contrasts the glowing red tones of the background with the cool blue, green and yellow tones of the figural details. Incidentally, the male figure in the middle is Rudolf Bing, who was the Metropolitan Opera's director at that time and had commissioned the artworks by Chagall. The artist has thus taken up the centuries-old tradition of depicting the patron of an artwork in the work itself (for this, see Sorlier, op. cit.).

Catalogue Raisonné

Sorlier CS 39; Sorlier Posters 111

Literature

Charles Sorlier, Les affiches de Marc Chagall, Paris 1975, p. 108 and 110