Signed Chagall Lithographs

For collectors of lithographs and other vintage fine art prints, interest in original Marc Chagall signed lithographs has deepened over the years.

Marc Chagall lithographs as well as his other prints and paintings widely influenced the fantastic imagery of Surrealism and other movements of the 20th century. Known for his dreamlike creations inspired by folk art, Chagall drew on the colors and forms introduced by Cubism and Fauvism for a distinctive style all his own.

Chagall was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Liozna, Belarus, and one of his earliest teachers was painter Yehuda Pen, who ran a school of drawing and painting in nearby Vitebsk in western Russia. In 1907, Chagall went to St. Petersburg to continue his art studies, including with painter Léon Bakst with whom he would later collaborate on set designs for the Ballets Russes.

Chagall relied on the patronage of the Jewish community to get past the restrictions on Jewish people in Russia, like Maxim Vinaver, who in 1911 supported Chagall in traveling to Paris to study. There, he found a studio in the maze of Montparnasse ateliers nicknamed “La Ruche” (“The Hive”) alongside many fellow Jewish artists from around Europe, such as Expressionist painter Chaïm Soutine and painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani. He also began a long friendship with abstract colorist Robert Delaunay and his wife, artist Sonia Delaunay-Terk, with Chagall bringing some of their ideas of vivid color into his subsequent work.

That first stay in Paris lasted four prolific years, with Chagall absorbing the ideas of French Impressionism and Fauvism, leading to complex and enigmatic pieces, including the 1913 Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers depicting the artist at work in his studio, a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower through the window, and the 1911 I and the Village evoking memories of his Jewish community in Belarus with the face of a goat and a man gazing at each other, enveloped by intersecting colors and shapes.

The outbreak of World War I, which unfolded when Chagall had returned to Russia for his fiancée Bella Rosenberg, cut off his return to Paris. During those years in Russia, he became extremely enthusiastic about the Russian Revolution, in particular its promise to grant full citizenship to Jewish people like him, and was named the Commissar for Art in Vitebsk, although he became disenchanted with its ideology and eventually resigned.

Chagall left the Soviet Union in 1922, living in Berlin and Paris again in 1923. The outbreak of World War II and the Nazi invasion of France compelled him to flee to the United States. (His monographs had been destroyed in Nazi book burnings and some of his works confiscated from museums and displayed as part of a “Degenerate Art” exhibition.) After the war, he returned to France, and throughout the rest of his life, he continued to expand his practice.

Chagall had created etchings of Russian life during the 1920s but would explore printmaking later more deeply, during the 1950s, when he sought guidance from veteran lithographer Charles Sorlier, who became a friend and collaborator.

Chagall’s vibrant and densely colorful prints are known around the world. There are rare single lithographs from the artist’s largest print portfolios that contain over two dozen colors. In 1960, he was commissioned to paint a new ceiling for the Opéra Garnier in Paris and stained-glass windows for the cathedrals in Metz and Reims around the same time. Chagall’s windows are celebrated today both for their narrative depth and rich swaths of color, and he granted permission to his printmaking associate Sorlier to create lithographs based on his works in stained glass.

Shop Marc Chagall signed lithographs, numbered Chagall lithographs and more of the artist's kaleidoscopic original prints, including figurative prints and landscape lithographs, on 1stDibs. 

Decorating with fine art prints — whether they’re figurative prints, abstract prints or another variety — has always been a practical way of bringing a space to life as well as bringing works by an artist you love into your home.

Pursued in the 1960s and ’70s, largely by Pop artists drawn to its associations with mass production, advertising, packaging and seriality, as well as those challenging the primacy of the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, printmaking was embraced in the 1980s by painters and conceptual artists ranging from David Salle and Elizabeth Murray to Adrian Piper and Sherrie Levine.

Printmaking is the transfer of an image from one surface to another. An artist takes a material like stone, metal, wood or wax, carves, incises, draws or otherwise marks it with an image, inks or paints it and then transfers the image to a piece of paper or other material.

Fine art prints are frequently confused with their more commercial counterparts. After all, our closest connection to the printed image is through mass-produced newspapers, magazines and books, and many people don’t realize that even though prints are editions, they start with an original image created by an artist with the intent of reproducing it in a small batch. Fine art prints are created in strictly limited editions — 20 or 30 or maybe 50 — and are always based on an image created specifically to be made into an edition.

Many people think of revered Dutch artist Rembrandt as a painter but may not know that he was a printmaker as well. His prints have been preserved in time along with the work of other celebrated printmakers such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol. These fine art prints are still highly sought after by collectors.

“It’s another tool in the artist’s toolbox, just like painting or sculpture or anything else that an artist uses in the service of mark making or expressing him- or herself,” says International Fine Print Dealers Association (IFPDA) vice president Betsy Senior, of New York’s Betsy Senior Fine Art, Inc.

Because artist’s editions tend to be more affordable and available than his or her unique works, they’re more accessible and can be a great opportunity to bring a variety of colors, textures and shapes into a space.

For tight corners, select small fine art prints as opposed to the oversized bold piece you’ll hang as a focal point in the dining area. But be careful not to choose something that is too big for your space. And feel free to lean into it if need be — not every work needs picture-hanging hooks. Leaning a larger fine art print against the wall behind a bookcase can add a stylish installation-type dynamic to your living room. (Read more about how to arrange wall art here.)

Find fine art prints for sale on 1stDibs today.