Greeting Card for Association des Amis du Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall 1977

This is a greeting card by Marc Chagall, likely a lithograph, made for the Association des Amis du Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall. Look at the inky blacks that dance and define the figures, a wonderful sense of depth achieved through a few simple marks. You can really see the hand of the artist here, can’t you? The texture feels almost velvety in places, then scratchy and urgent elsewhere. Notice how the figures embrace, seemingly floating against a blank ground, full of gestural energy. It's raw and kind of vulnerable. Those strokes almost feel like he's carving away at a memory, pulling it from some deep, personal space. The forms are undefined but intimate. Chagall is known for his dreamlike narratives, and I think of another artist, Redon, who worked a lot in lithography and appreciated a similar kind of ambiguity. It's like they’re inviting us to fill in the blanks, to bring our own stories to the table.