Original Marc Chagall Poster Maeght 1973 (Big Size)

This is a rare, large-format original poster created in 1973 by Marc Chagall for his exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in Paris, printed by ARTE, the printing house of the Maeght family. At roughly 1.60 by 1.20 metres, it covers nearly five times the surface of a standard exhibition poster. It was conceived first and foremost for the walls and hoardings of Paris, where Chagall, then well past eighty, still held his place in the city's streets half a century ago. More than fifty years later, it has lost none of that presence.

Marc Chagall (1887–1985), born Moishe Segal in Vitebsk and naturalised French in 1937, painted, drew, engraved and designed for stage and stained glass with a vocabulary entirely his own: floating lovers, village memories, animals, musicians and angels suspended in saturated colour. The year this poster was made, 1973, also saw the opening of the museum devoted to his Biblical Message in Nice, a reminder of how fully his work had entered public life by then. His long association with the Maeght family, which published his work and showed it in Paris, made the Galerie Maeght the natural stage for this exhibition.

Posters of this scale were costly to print and were made to be pasted up and weathered, which is why so few survive today. Hung on a wall, this one works less like a poster than like a painting: a full-scale Chagall image, at the size it was meant to be seen.

The poster is in overall good condition (B+), with only some small imperfections on the sides. See pictures for full condition details.

A rare monumental piece — Chagall at the Galerie Maeght, printed by ARTE on the scale of the Paris streets it was made for.