La Fontaine's Fables illustrated by Chagall.
Hazan| N° d'inventaire | 22121 |
| Format | 18.5 x 23 |
| Détails | 220 p., 1 paperback issue, bound in a slipcase. |
| Publication | Paris, 2019 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782754111195 |
"One of my most tenacious ambitions as a publisher had been to publish La Fontaine's Fables worthily illustrated. I asked the Russian painter Marc Chagall to illustrate the book. This choice of a Russian painter to interpret the most French of our poets was not understood. Yet it was precisely because of the oriental sources of the fabulist that I had thought of an artist whose origins and culture made this prestigious Orient familiar. My hopes were not disappointed: Chagall made a hundred dazzling gouaches. Thus recalls Ambroise Vollard, the famous art dealer who, in 1925, entrusted Marc Chagall with this project. The artist produced a hundred color gouaches to prepare the black and white engraving work, drawing inspiration from his Russian culture and the richness of French landscapes. Much more than a publishing project, this commission was for Marc Chagall a passport to France, which placed him in the footsteps of French artists and writers. While creating the gouaches, his wife Bella read aloud to him the Fables, speaking to his imagination and inspiration. The death of Ambroise Vollard in 1937 interrupted the publication of the work, which would not appear until 1952, at the initiative of Tériade. This box set celebrates this dialogue between two exceptional artists, La Fontaine, on the one hand, today the best-known of the 17th-century French poets, a dazzling stylist and moralist of human nature; and Marc Chagall, on the other hand, who delivers his dreamlike and personal vision of the Fables, nourished by the snowy landscapes of Vitebsk and by an animism inherited from the Hasidic traditions of Eastern Europe, punctuated by the colors and atmospheres of Brittany, Auvergne and the south of France. Produced in collaboration with the Marc Chagall Committee, this box set pays tribute to this original artistic encounter, through some sixty magnificent gouaches, accompanied for the first time by their engravings. It is completed by an explanatory booklet which relates the genesis and the meaning of this dialogue between the two artists.
"One of my most tenacious ambitions as a publisher had been to publish La Fontaine's Fables worthily illustrated. I asked the Russian painter Marc Chagall to illustrate the book. This choice of a Russian painter to interpret the most French of our poets was not understood. Yet it was precisely because of the oriental sources of the fabulist that I had thought of an artist whose origins and culture made this prestigious Orient familiar. My hopes were not disappointed: Chagall made a hundred dazzling gouaches. Thus recalls Ambroise Vollard, the famous art dealer who, in 1925, entrusted Marc Chagall with this project. The artist produced a hundred color gouaches to prepare the black and white engraving work, drawing inspiration from his Russian culture and the richness of French landscapes. Much more than a publishing project, this commission was for Marc Chagall a passport to France, which placed him in the footsteps of French artists and writers. While creating the gouaches, his wife Bella read aloud to him the Fables, speaking to his imagination and inspiration. The death of Ambroise Vollard in 1937 interrupted the publication of the work, which would not appear until 1952, at the initiative of Tériade. This box set celebrates this dialogue between two exceptional artists, La Fontaine, on the one hand, today the best-known of the 17th-century French poets, a dazzling stylist and moralist of human nature; and Marc Chagall, on the other hand, who delivers his dreamlike and personal vision of the Fables, nourished by the snowy landscapes of Vitebsk and by an animism inherited from the Hasidic traditions of Eastern Europe, punctuated by the colors and atmospheres of Brittany, Auvergne and the south of France. Produced in collaboration with the Marc Chagall Committee, this box set pays tribute to this original artistic encounter, through some sixty magnificent gouaches, accompanied for the first time by their engravings. It is completed by an explanatory booklet which relates the genesis and the meaning of this dialogue between the two artists.