Vitebsk local historian collected about 500 postcards with reproductions of Marc Chagall's works

July 6, Vitebsk / Olga Bogacheva - BELTA /. Vitebsk local historian Arkady Podlipsky has collected about 500 postcards with reproductions of Marc Chagall's works over 30 years. The owner of the unusual collection told a BELTA correspondent about this. According to him, the postcards were acquired by him personally, as well as through acquaintances in Germany, France, Russia, Switzerland, Italy, Holland, Israel, England, Spain, and Denmark. The oldest exhibit, a black-and-white postcard "Paris from the Window of My Studio," was issued in 1914 in Germany and reached the philocardist after a long journey through the USA and Sverdlovsk. Today, this unusual postcard, as well as more than 170 others, can be seen at an exhibition in the Vitebsk Regional Museum of Local Lore, which opened for the 125th anniversary of Marc Chagall's birth. The exhibits included in the exposition reflect reproductions of the artist's works, views of Chagall museums in Vitebsk, interiors of the House-Museum, and monuments in his honor. "The Town Hall displays a very small fraction of what has been published in postcards even over the last half-century. But even this gives a sufficient idea of the artist's work and reflects its main stages," the interlocutor noted. Arkady Podlipsky recalled that the first postcards with reproductions of Marc Chagall's works were issued in the summer of 1914 by the Berlin art gallery Der Sturm, which was holding the artist's second solo exhibition at that time. In the subsequent period, up to the end of the 1950s, postcards with reproductions of Chagall's works, if issued at all, were irregular and in small quantities. And only starting from the 1960s, they began to appear in large print runs in many countries around the world. The main number of such postcards is published by museums that own the master's works from Vitebsk. Some publishing houses specializing in the production of visual products also issue them. "It is very difficult to count how many Chagall postcards have been issued in total. It is obvious that their number is in the hundreds, and possibly (considering different editions of the same work) even thousands. Difficulties in counting arise because not all publishers keep records of their products. And if they do, it's only in recent years. Moreover, they usually do not publish catalogs of their releases. The only real way to find out what and how much has been published on the Chagall theme is to collect postcards," the philocardist noted. In his opinion, this is quite realistic, but requires considerable funds. For example, he estimated the cost of the works presented at the exhibition alone at 5-6 thousand euros. Touching on his future plans, the local historian shared that he will continue to expand his collection and also intends to compile a catalog of Chagall postcards. Marc Chagall (1887-1985) is the most famous student of the Vitebsk artist-teacher Yehuda Pen (1854-1937) and one of the most famous natives of Vitebsk in the world. Writer I. Ehrenburg spoke very well of his attachment to his hometown: "It seems that the entire history of world painting has not known an artist so attached to his hometown as Chagall... Wishing to say something good about Paris, Chagall called it 'my second Vitebsk.' Chagall's work over the last century has attracted the attention not only of collectors and museums worldwide, but also of publishers of picture postcards and philocardists (collectors of postcards)." -0-