Vintage 1967 Marc Chagall Metropolitan Opera – Die Zauberflote Mozart Poster

“Featuring unparalleled color saturation and rich texture, this poster was designed in 1967 by Marc Chagall for the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. This work was created for the performance of Die Zauberflote, or The Magic Flute, and it is a two act opera by Mozart to German libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder. This poster is a limited edition of 5000.

The Metropolitan Opera House was opened in 1883 and relocated in 1967 to the current address in Lincoln Center in New York City. It is the largest classical music organization in North America.

After designing sets and costumes in Russia in 1914, Chagall has developed a strong interest in the world of theater. With such love and respect for theater, poetry, and music, Chagall wanted to give back to that community so he started to create murals for theaters to celebrate art and culture. This work was the poster version of the mural in the Metropolitan Opera House.

Marc Zakharovich Chagall, born Moishe Zakharovich Shagal (24 June 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Russian-French artist of Belarusian Jewish origin. An early modernist, he was associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic format, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.

Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as “the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century” (though Chagall saw his work as “not the dream of one people but of all humanity”). According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be “the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists”. For decades, he “had also been respected as the world’s preeminent Jewish artist”. Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
Before World War I, he travelled between Saint Petersburg, Paris and Berlin. During this period he created his own mixture and style of modern art based on his idea of Eastern European Jewish folk culture. He spent the wartime years in Soviet Belarus, becoming one of the country’s most distinguished artists and a member of the modernist avant-garde, founding the Vitebsk Arts College before leaving again for Paris in 1922.

He had two basic reputations, writes Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism’s “golden age” in Paris, where “he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, and the influence of Fauvism gave rise to Surrealism”. Yet throughout these phases of his style “he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk.” “When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is”.” – Ross Art Group where this piece was originally purchased.