In Besançon, customs offer the Museum of Fine Arts a work by Marc Chagall seized twenty years ago

The Bisontine heritage enhanced by a work by a prestigious painter. Franche-Comté customs offered Marc Chagall’s print engraved in 1924, The Acrobat on the violinat the Museum of Fine Arts and Archeology of Besançon, Monday July 20, relays HERE Besançon . This is the first time that the museum exhibits a work by the Russian painter who became a French citizen, in 1937.

Seized during a road check at the Swiss border in 2006, the work had been kept in Franche-Comté customs warehouses for twenty years. “ The engraving was intended for Switzerland with other works of art, but it was not accompanied by documents justifying the State’s authorization allowing it to leave French territory.explains Estelle Rocquelin, the regional director of customs in Besançon, to HERE Besançon.

A work with a dreamlike style

For Maël Vandewalle, curator at the Besançon Museum of Fine Arts, who helped authenticate the work, “ with this slightly dreamlike style, this dream world very detached from reality”, the artist’s touch is easily recognizable. The Acrobat on the violin depicts a man with a long beard and a hat. “ The violin and the acrobat himself are characteristic motifs of Chagall »specifies the curator. “He is an artist who is present in all major public collections”he rejoices.

Born in Vitebsk in Belarus, then a provincial city of the Russian Empire in 1887, Marc Chagall undertook several stays in Paris, notably between 1911-1914 and in the 1920s. It is during this second period that the artist will realize The Acrobat on the violin. Of Jewish faith, he fled Nazism by going into exile in the United States during the Second World War. The year 1948 marked his return to France. In addition to painting, he practiced lithography, ceramics, sculpture and worked on the decoration of the church of Assy. Among his most remarkable achievements was the decoration of the ceiling of the Opéra Garnier in Paris, between 1963 and 1964. Chagall died on March 28, 1985, in his almost century-old villa in Saint-Paul de Vence.