Self-portrait (Selbstportrait); plate 17 from "Mein Leben"

 

Marc Chagall

  1887 - 1985 (biography)

1922  

drypoint 

10 15/16 x 8 7/16" platemark 

pencil, lower right 

97 of 110  

 

Kornfeld 17; plate 17 of Mein Leben, portfolio of 20 drypoints/etchings; cover illustration of "Chagall: l'oeuvre grave," Bibliotheque nationale 

ivory laid 

published 

Paul Cassirer, Berlin 

TOPE106 

$10,000.00 

Plate 17 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.

In "Selbstportrait" Chagall shows his head crowned by a little house, and a quartet of figures - perhaps his parents, wife, and child - just below. The placement of the image high up in the plate with a vast expanse of unmarked matrix surrounding it suggests both a sense of isolation and of minute intimacy.