Marc Chagall; Life and Work [from half-title page]

The format is approximately 8.5 inches by 12 inches by 2.5 inches (thick). 775 pages. This has more than 1,250 illustration including 53 tipped-in colorplates. Notes. Chronology. Classified Catalogue. Bibliography. exhibitions. List of Illustrations. Photographic Sources. Index. The book was originally published in German and translated by Robert Allen. Meyer was a well-known art historian and museum director. Between 1955 and 1961, Meyer was the director of the Kunsthalle, Berne. He organized the first retrospective of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, a close friend, in Switzerland in 1956. Later, he created the famous Giacometti Room in the Kunsthaus, Basel, after becoming the director of Basel's Kunstmuseum in 1962, a post he held until 1980. Chagall's daughter Ida married art historian Franz Meyer in January 1952, and feeling that her father missed the companionship of a woman in his home, introduced him to Valentina (Vava) Brodsky, a woman from a similar Russian Jewish background, who had run a successful millinery business in London. She became his secretary, and after a few months agreed to stay only if Chagall married her. The marriage took place in July, 1952. Marc Chagall (born Moishe Shagal; 6 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 28 March 1985) was a Russian and French artist. An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris, as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints. Chagall was born in 1887, into a Jewish family near Vitebsk, today in Belarus, but at that time in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Before World War I, he traveled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During that period, he created his own mixture and style of modern art, based on his ideas of Eastern European and Jewish folklore. He spent the wartime years in his native Belarus, becoming one of the country's most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College. He later worked in and near Moscow in difficult conditions during hard times in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, before leaving again for Paris in 1923. During World War II, he escaped occupied France to the United States, where he lived in New York City for seven years before returning to France in 1948. According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz as well as the Fraumünster in Zürich, windows for the UN and the Art Institute of Chicago and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra. He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where "he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism". "When Matisse dies", Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is". Derived from a Kirkus review: Chagall's steadily increasing popularity will heighten the response for this handsome portrait of the artist and his work and the extensive interpretation given by his son-in-law, Dr. Meyer. Dr. Meyer has provided an understanding of his total oeuvre, the chronology of its development, the correlation of the subjective and objective facets, the many motifs, and of course the intense color, imagery, playful phantasmagoria and symbolism which are so much a part of it. Along with photographs of the artist and the family, there are many black and white sketches, reproductions- a total of 1250 illustrations of which 53 are full color plates. A thorough documentation of names, places and titles appended. Presumed First U. S. Edition, First printing. …