Marc Chagall

[17/03/2003]

 

Marc Chagall was one of the most prolofic artists of the 20th Century. Prices are still under those recorded in 1990 but started rising 3 years ago. The major 2003 retrospectives are very likely to boost the market.

Caught between his Russian culture and his Jewishness Marc CHAGALL spent his life in conflict with his native art traditions. He was born in Vitebsk in 1887 into a Jewish family of nine children. He moved to Paris in 1910 where he managed to adopt some of the trends of the time without sacrificing his cultural identity. His fantasy worlds and floating creatures enchanted the surrealists. His first solo exhibition was at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in 1914. Later, having returned to Russia, he painted the décor and stage sets for the Jewish Art Theatre in Moscow. The market eventually embraced his work in 1926 following his first major exhibition in New York. He was back in New York in 1941, this time fleeing European anti-semitism and, in 1946, was honoured with a high-profile retrospective show at the MoMA (Museum of Modern Art). He recrossed the Atlantic to France in 1948, was awarded the engraving prize at the Venice Biennale before settling down in Provence and devoting himself to ceramics and sculpture. The French government gave him a string of commissions and he continued to turn out around 20 lithographs a year, working right up to his death in 1985.

Artworks at auctions

Chagall is one of the most significant artists of the 20th Century. After Picasso he is the most productive artist on the market. In 2002, 666 Chagall works were sold at auction, of which 88% were prints. The artist produced etchings, engravings and lithographs. He made numerous plates for his illustrations of works such as Gogol’s “Dead Souls” 1924; “LaFontaine’s Fables” (1926), “the Bible” or “Daphnis & Chloé”. Many lithographs (large-scale or black and white prints) can be bought for less than USD 1,000. Although any rare complete collections of plates in excellent condition tend to be pounced on at auction. Printed in 60 copies, sets of the “Daphnis & Chloé” series of 42 lithographs have twice gone for over a million dollars (in 1990 and 1992).
Today investors can no longer pick up a decent Chagall painting for less than USD 100,000. At best, below this price, there are a handful of small format paintings dating from 1960s-1970s. At auction, investors prefer works produced in 1900-1925. The latter period of the artist’s life has long been considered repetitive and less sumptuous. That said, a very large format Chagall entitled Le village en fête ( 1978) went under the hammer at USD 11m at the Kornfeld auction in Berne on 21 June 2002, suggesting that investors no longer care so much about dates. This is the second-highest bid for the artist, just behind Anniversaire (1923) which was sold for USD 13.5m at Sotheby’s New York on 17 May 1990 to Hironori Aoki, a Japanese collector who loves Chagall’s work and now has 29 Chagall paintings in his possession. He epitomises the enthusiasm for the artist among Japanese collectors which drove up Chagall prices in the 1980s. When the Japanese withdrew from the market in the early 1990s prices naturally fell.

The market places

The recent exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum was testimony to the still high number of Japanese enthusiasts. That said, the US still has the largest share of the market. In the last four years, 37% of auctioned works were sold in the United States. As in the UK, all types of Chagall’s output can be found in the USA. Germany and France both have fairly large markets for prints which account for 10% of turnover with almost 23% of sales volume.

Buy or sell

Current prices are still below the 1990 peak, especially for works dating from the artist’s latter years. Chagall’s painting Danseuse à la Robe Fleurie (1971) which was bought for USD 1.3m remained unsold in 1998 with an estimate of USD 500,000-700,000. It only found a buyer in May 2000 when it went under the hammer for less than a quarter of its purchasing price at USD 350,000.
Nonetheless, prices started to rise in 1999 and had picked up 40% by 2002. With prices still well below their level in the late 1980s, it is tempting to see the potential upside as high today, particularly if the we see more major exhibitions along the lines of “Chagall connu et inconnu”, at the Grand Palais in Paris (4 March – 23 June 2003) and moving to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (26 July – 4 November 2003). But buying post-1960s paintings is a riskier business. To be sure of reselling, investors are better off buying works from the more popular periods. Canvases from 1910-1920 are in short supply, but there are many watercolours from this period still around.

    Marc ChagallArtprice Indexall media categories, base January 1997 = 100, currency: EUR   Marc Chagall Number of lots sold   Marc Chagall Auction sales turnover 1999-2002 / weight by country © Artprice