Suzanne's Mom's Blog

Photo: Besançon Museum of Fine Arts.
“The Acrobat with the Violin,” Marc Chagall, 1924.

I wonder how a painting by a famous artist could languish in customs in France for decades. Didn’t anybody wonder where it was? At any rate, the snafu turned out to be lucky for a town on the French-Spanish border. Customs has given the local museum a present.

Min Chen writes at Artnet, “Twenty years after being detained at the Franco-Swiss border, a Marc Chagall artwork has finally reemerged from customs.

“The etching, ‘L’Acrobate Au Violon’ (1924), arrived in 2005 at the roadside border as one of a truckload of artworks bound for Switzerland. French officials found two of the works—the Chagall and a 1959 drawing by Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine—were not authorized to leave the country, customs authorities said. They arrested the two Swiss nationals transporting the art, charging them with hiding cultural goods, according to the London Times.

“The perpetrators were fined, and the two artworks were confiscated and stored at a customs warehouse in eastern France. There, they languished, forgotten until their rediscovery two years ago. …

“The Chagall has been gifted to the Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology of Besançon, France. Following the official handover on Monday, the Chagall etching will go on view at the institution in September.

“ ‘The customs service has really honored us,’ Besançon‘s mayor Ludovic Fagaut told the Times. ‘It’s the first Marc Chagall to enter the museum.’

“Granted, it’s not a major Chagall. Paintings by the Russian-born French artist regularly fetch millions at auction (his record stands at $28.4 million for a lush canvas from 1928). Still, L’Acrobate au Violon is quintessential Chagall, with its titular acrobat balancing atop a violin — a recurring motif in the artist’s work — while appearing to juggle a chicken and another acrobat.

“ ‘You can easily recognize Chagall with this somewhat dreamlike style,’ Maël Vandewalle, the museum’s curator, told Besançon Ici. ‘It’s this dream world so detached from reality.’

“Chagall’s most famous etchings emerge from his decades-long partnership with French dealer Ambroise Vollard, who commissioned the artist for illustrated books such as Nikolai Gogol‘s Dead Souls (1948) and The Fables of La Fontaine (1952). L’Acrobate originated from another Vollard commission focused on painters who had become engravers, and was issued in an edition of 150.” More at Artnet, here.

Are you familiar with Chagall’s floating people? The chickens? The violins?

This is from wikipedia: “Marc Chagall (born Moishe Shaga) … was a Russian and French artist of Jewish ancestry. An early modernist, he was associated with the École de Paris, as well as several major artistic styles and created works in a wide range of artistic formats, including painting, drawings, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramics, tapestries and fine art prints.

“Chagall was born in 1887, into a Jewish family near Vitebsk, today in Belarus, but at that time in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire. Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During that period, he created his own mixture and style of modern art, based on his ideas of Eastern European and Jewish folklore. He spent the wartime years in Vitebsk and Petrograd, becoming one of the Russia’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Museum of Modern Art and People’s Art School. He later worked in and near Moscow in difficult conditions during hard times in Russia following the Bolshevik Revolution, before leaving again for Paris in 1923. During World War II, he escaped occupied France to the United States, where he lived in New York City for seven years before returning to France in 1948.” More at wikipedia, here. (I removed wikipedia’s footnotes.)