Terre Des Hommes

Description

Terre Des Hommes, 1971 is a Lithograph Poster is an interpretative rendering of a Lithograph executed by Charles Sorlier. The illustration on the poster is 19 by 16 inches. This print was printed by Atelier Mourlot Paris. Sorlier 127.

This plate is patterned after a tiny original lithograph in black and white, intended to be used as a birth announcement. After enlarging the picture considerably, a color overlay was produced which served as a dummy for this plate. This poster was donated by Marc Chagall to a social service organization, “Land of Men”, dedicated to helping children in need, to be sold for the benefit of the organization.

Chagall’s style has been described as a hybrid of Cubism, Fauvism, and Symbolism, and his supernatural subjects are thought to have significantly influenced the Surrealists. Though he actively engaged in the Parisian artistic community, art for Chagall was first and foremost a means of personal expression. He preferred to be considered separately from other artists, his imagery and allegory uniquely his own.

Marc Chagall was a French-Russian artist whose work anticipated the dream-like imagery of Surrealism. Over the course of his career Chagall developed the poetic, amorphous, and deeply personal visual language evident in the painting I and the Village (1911). “When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it—a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand as a final test,” he said. “If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.” Born Moishe Shagal on July 7, 1887 in Vitebsk, Russia (present-day Belarus) to a Hasidic Jewish family, the artist was raised immersed in Jewish culture and iconography.

Studying under the artist Yehuda Pen as a youth, the Judaic traditions and folklore of his hometown permeated Chagall’s paintings. After studying in St. Petersburg, the artist moved to Paris in 1910, where he quickly befriended members of the French avant-garde, including Robert Delaunay and Fernand Leger. Marc Chagall painted dream-like subjects rooted in personal history and Eastern European folklore.