Four Tales of the Arabian Nights, Pl.1. Then the Boy Displayed to the Dervish

Lithograph in colours, 1948, from Four Tales of the Arabian Nights. Signed, numbered 65 of an edition of 90 copies (there were also 10 copies in Roman numerals and 11 lettered A-K), and inscribed ‘Pl. 1’ in pencil. Printed by Albert Carman, City Island, New York and published by Pantheon Books Inc., New York. Dimensions: image 37.8 x 28.2 cm (14.9 x 11.1 in.), sheet 43.2 x 33 cm (17 x 13 in.). Reference: Mourlot 36; Cramer 18.

Chagall was commissioned a series of lithographic illustrations for One Thousand and One Nights in 1946 by émigré publisher Kurt Wolff while still exiled in New York. The artist, reeling from the death of his beloved wife, Bella, had somewhat unwittingly started a new domestic arrangement and a new family with Virginia McNeil. The biographer Wullschlager sees  these works  as “an escape from his difficult domestic situation into heightened exotic fantasy”.  The structure of Arabian Nights was particularly resonated with him, with its stories within stories, a literary expedient that he adapted to imagery and illustration, allowing his fantasy to create fantastic permutations. In Wullshlager words “he created a resplendent word where image slides into image” [as the stories themselves slide into other stories] “just as Scheherazade’s narrative transformations hold the Sultan spellbound. Published in 1948, the work is acknowledged as the greatest achievement in colour lithography in America before 1950.(Wullschlager, J. Chagall: Love and exile, 2008, pp 233-234.) The present lithograph, in our experience, has always been the most iconic and sought-after of the series.