An der Staffelei, a.k.a. At the Easel, from "Mein Leben"

Marc Chagall

Plate 18 from the seminal portfolio Mine Leben, which marked the beginning of Marc Chagall's love affair with printmaking. By 1922 the thirty-five year-old was an established painter in Imperial Russia, and was living with his wife, writer Bella Rosenfeld, and daughter Ida in Berlin, Germany, as they awaited approval of exit visas for their move to France. During this time he penned an autobiographical essay of his early years, with prosaic remembrances of the people and events that took place in Vitebsk, the village where he grew up.

This manuscript was then read by German galleriest Paul Cassirer, who was greatly impressed with the avant-garde artist's written word and wanted to publish the work with etching illustrations by Chagall -- who had never before worked in printmaking. Cassirer introduced him to printmaker Hermann Struck, who began intensive lessons in etching and drypoint. Immediately taking to the medium that was so different from painting, Chagall completed twenty-six plates in three weeks. For the duration of his stay in Berlin, he set aside painting to focus entirely on printmaking techniques, including intaglio, lithography, and woodcut.

Mein Leben would ultimately be published in two separate forms: as the portfolio of twenty images in 1923, and the book with Chagall's text in 1931. This was due to the difficulty in translating Chagall's prose at the time, and Cassirer felt that the delicately rendered, avant-garde imagery stood alone as a visual depiction of Chagall's experience as a young Russian Jew in rapidly changing times.

"At the Easel" is one of the most recognized works of Chagall's early printmaking career, and is exemplary of his navigation through the ever-evolving Modernist sensibilities of the time. By the 1920s he was emerging from his beginnings in Cubism and Fauvism and was absorbing the theory of Surrealism, surrounded as he was by the pioneers of the genre. However, he refrained from applying any label to his own work, and remained anchored to his own fantastic universe with a symbology developed in his own visual language. Here, he "stands" at an easel with his feet in the air, his chin on the floor, his palette and brush in his hands and an inscrutible expression on his face.