A committee that still issues opinions, and a print market divided by whether the artist touched the stone.
Vitebsk4 weighted checks
For your own painting or print, Art Scan: Painting Identifier — Lovenhall’s painting & art identifier app, free to try on iPhone, iPad & Android — names the likely artist, title and period from a photo.
Chagall is one of the artists where a committee still functions: the Comité Marc Chagall in Paris considers works submitted to it and issues opinions, which the market accepts. That is increasingly rare and it makes the Chagall market more tractable than Warhol's.
The print market divides on a distinction that matters commercially: original lithographs, which Chagall drew directly onto the stone or plate, and reproductions after his work, printed photomechanically from existing images. Both circulate widely and only the first is an original print.
The Cramer catalogue documents the illustrated books and the graphic work, and matching against it is the practical first step.
The Comité Marc Chagall considers works submitted for opinion. For a painting or a significant unique work, that is the route the market recognises.
For prints, the question is usually whether the sheet is an original lithograph — drawn by the artist on the stone or plate — or a photomechanical reproduction after a Chagall image. Both were produced in quantity and both circulate; only the first is an original print in the market's sense.
The distinction is read under a loupe. An original lithograph shows the character of the drawing on the stone with no dot structure; a reproduction shows a regular dot grid. Many legitimate reproductions were issued in illustrated books and portfolios and are catalogued as such.
The Cramer catalogue records the illustrated books and graphic work, including which plates are original lithographs and which are reproductions.
Ordered by how much each one settles. The decisive checks are the ones worth your first five minutes; the supporting ones only matter once those are clean.
Under a loupe, an original lithograph shows the artist's drawing laid on the stone, with tonal variation and no dot structure. A reproduction shows a regular dot grid. This single check separates the two markets and most of what people bring falls on the reproduction side.
The Cramer catalogue records the graphic work and the illustrated books, including which plates are original and which are reproductions. Matching the sheet against its entry establishes what it is.
Pencil signatures sit on the paper's surface. Signatures printed within the image are part of the reproduction and add nothing. A great many Chagall sheets from illustrated books carry no signature at all, which is correct for them.
The catalogue records papers and sheet sizes. Trimmed margins are common on sheets removed from books and reduce value, though they do not make the sheet inauthentic.
Outright forgery of Chagall prints exists but is less of a problem than misdescription. The dominant issue is reproductions from illustrated books sold as original lithographs — often innocently, because they look like prints, they are on good paper, and they came out of a genuine Chagall publication.
The loupe settles it, and it is worth doing before any money changes hands.
Each of these is checked differently. The ones with their own page have enough that is specific to them to be worth reading separately.
The great colour lithograph suite, and the most sought-after of the illustrated books.
Read within the checks aboveEtchings and lithographs across several publications, catalogued individually.
Read within the checks above
Lovenhall ArtThe checks tell you how it was made. The instrument tells you what it appears to be, and roughly what its kind fetches.