Lithograph from 1967.
The edition of 56/75 on Arches paper.
Dimensions of work: 63.2 x 50.2 cm.
Hand signed.
Publisher: Éditions A.C. Mazo, Paris.
Reference: Mourlot 531, Cramer 72.
The work is in Very good condition.
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Marc Chagall’s Nous habitons parmi les fleurs... belongs to Sur la terre des dieux, a group of colour lithographs in which the artist approached classical Greece through poetry rather than archaeological reconstruction. The title, drawn from a pastoral text attributed to Aristophanes, evokes an existence among meadow flowers and secluded groves. In Chagall’s interpretation, this literary landscape becomes a suspended, dreamlike world populated by lovers, animals and hybrid mythological beings.
The composition is organised through radiant passages of blue, green, yellow and red. A blue figure rises through the centre, surrounded by flowering vegetation, while a red reclining figure and a small animal occupy the lower register. Above them, a winged or horned figure appears to move freely across the pictorial space. Scale and gravity are deliberately unstable: figures float, overlap and merge with the landscape, creating the sense that human, animal and natural life belong to a single poetic realm.
Chagall travelled to Greece in 1952 and 1954. According to the Musée National Marc Chagall, his encounter with the country opened a new imaginative universe that continued to nourish his art. Here, classical culture is filtered through the artist’s personal vocabulary of colour, memory, love and metamorphosis rather than represented literally.
Executed in 1967, the lithograph was printed by Mourlot in Paris and published by A.C. Mazo. This impression is signed and numbered 56/75 in pencil. The work is documented as Mourlot 531 and Cramer Books 72, giving it a well-established place within Chagall’s graphic oeuvre.
