The Grandmother. Die Grossmutter. by Marc Chagall, 1887-1985

Marc Chagall, 1887-1985
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The Grandmother. Die Grossmutter.

Original etching with drypoint in black ink; unique impression with very extensive watercolour colouring by Chagall. 1922. Signed in pencil twice (lower left and
lower right). The only known impression with added colouring - previously in the Chagall Archive, St. Paul de Vence. One of three known proofs before the edition (the other two in black ink only). Unique in this form. Etched for the series: Mem Leben - My Life. Issued edition in black only of 110 impressions. Published by Cassirer, Berlin 1923.
Ref: Komfeld - Chagall Etchings no 4, proof a.

Outstandingly fine contrasty impression. On pale cream laid hollande-type paper. Excellent original unrestored condition -a hint of paper discoloration at the extreme bottom sheet edge; otherwise perfect. Sheet: 10x9ins. Plate: 209x160mm

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The only known impression of this famous etching on which Chagall extended and developed the image using hand-painted watercolour. This is the actual impression cited in the Komfeld oeuvre catalogue, and previously located in the Chagall Archive in St. Paul de Vence.

Chagall finally left his native Russia in 1922 when he realised that there was no future for his individual and avant-garde approach to art within the increasingly rigid and
backward-looking atmosphere of the revolutionary 'new-regime'. He travelled immediately to Berlin, remembering the warm reception he had received there for his first exhibition in 1914. Following a meeting with the dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer he began work on the first great series of prints in his oeuvre. On the theme 'Mein Leben - My Life' he began to etch a series of 20 compositions in which characters and incidents of his life in the Jewish community in Russia are used as vehicles to express his new ideas about form, space and above all spiritual experience.

In his earlier visit to Paris in 1910-14 he had absorbed ideas from Cubism, from Futurism and from the birth of abstraction in artists like Delaunay. Back in Russia he found himself increasingly in conflict with the formalism inherent in the constructivist ideas of the leading avant-garde painters such as Malevich. He wanted to create a much more spiritual world in which largely figurative elements were freed from all conventional relationships of space or perspective and combined in such a way as to inspire a type of ecstatic lyricism for the viewer.