PARIS – Marcchagall.com, the official website dedicated to Marc Chagall and the promotion and understanding of his work, is now online. As the first initiative devoted to the artist on such a large scale, the website provides a comprehensive overview of Marc Chagall’s creation and allows visitors to discover and rediscover the work of this major 20th-century artist.
A selection of works, a look back at Marc Chagall’s different studios, archival documents, a presentation of the artist’s different techniques – this original project, led by the Association des Amis de Marc Chagall, in partnership with the Reunion des Musees Nationaux, the Institut national de l’audiovisuel and the Musee national Marc Chagall in Nice, invites visitors to discover the scope, diversity and richness of the artist’s work, offering new perspectives on his various explorations.
The online catalogue raisonne
As an online scientific project, the catalogue raisonne aims to list all the works created by the artist throughout his career, from 1906 to 1985.
Marc Chagall, studio of the villa Les Collines, Vence, 1959 © Luc Fournol / Photo12.
The catalogue is a real scientific tool for researchers, professionals and art lovers, resulting from extensive research work based on archives, the careful study of correspondence, administrative documents and photographic albums of works. This research is being conducted by the Association des Amis de Marc Chagall, with the Archives Marc et Ida Chagall and the consultation of the Comite Marc Chagall, as an extension of the first selective census work carried out by Franz Meyer, which was published in 1961.
The first volume published on March 15. Dedicated to the sculptures of Marc Chagall, it contains 97 sculptures created between 1952 and 1983. The second volume, scheduled for 2024, will be dedicated to the artist’s ceramics.
Discovery of Marc Chagall’s body of work
In parallel to this scientific approach, the Discovery section of the website allows users to navigate through selections of works via different approaches: thematic, visual, sensory and documentary. This project invites the visitor to discover the diversity of the artist’s techniques and the richness of Chagall’s work.
A highlight of the Archives Marc and Ida Chagall, Paris
The Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, a collection of several thousand documents, is the most important archive dedicated to the artist Marc Chagall. Composed of Marc Chagall’s correspondence (1910-1985), the collection is supplemented by numerous administrative documents, photographs of various works and documentary resources, the result of a long project of digitization.
In collaboration with the Societe Grahal, an in-depth process of inventory and research has identified more than 55,000 documents offering an unprecedented reading of the artist’s life and work, as well as a new vision of his collaborations with emblematic figures of 20th-century art such as Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Blaise Cendrars, Robert Delaunay, Le Corbusier, Aime Maeght, Andre Malraux, Diego Rivera, Philippe Soupault, Teriade and Ambroise Vollard.
These documents are available to researchers and amateur students of Marc Chagall’s work by request through the contact form on the website, marcchagall.com.
Online resources
The Resources section of the website includes an online library with the references of the works present in the bibliography relating to each work in the catalogue raisonne. It will be enriched as research progresses and new volumes of the catalogue raisonne are released.
The video library and the audio library offer access to a selection of programs drawn from the rich resources of the INA and subtitled in French.
2023 : A Chagall year
2023 will be marked by many events celebrating the artist Marc Chagall, including the exhibitions Chagall : Paris-New York at the Atelier des Lumieres in Paris and Chagall : Politique at La Piscine at the Musee d’art et d’histoire Andre Diligent de Roubaix, as well as the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Musee national Marc Chagall in Nice.
A project by the Association des Amis de Marc Chagall
Created in 2019 to defend and promote the work and reputation of the artist Marc Chagall, the Association des Amis de Marc Chagall has as its main mission the dissemination and inventory of his work through the realization of the official catalogue raisonne of Marc Chagall, with the assistance of the Comite Marc Chagall and the Marc and Ida Chagall Archives, drawing up an exhaustive panorama of the artist’s creation and techniques.
The Association des Amis de Marc Chagall is also responsible for managing the Marc and Ida Chagall Archives, made available by Marc Chagall’s estate.