BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

1/06/2005

Experts Doubt Authenticity of $650,000 Chagall Painting

Created: 01.06.2005 16:01 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 16:01 MSK, 13 minutes ago

MosNews

The authenticity of a painting said to be by late Belarus-born artist Marc Chagall, sold at auction in Minsk on Sunday for $650,000, has raised heated debates among art experts, Associated Press reported.

A Belarusian citizen made the winning bid for the oil-on-wood painting of a rooster after an expert he brought with him judged it to be a genuine Chagall, said Lyudmila Kononova, an executive director of the Paragis antique and auction house.

But shortly afterwards Tamara Karandasheva, head researcher at the Belarus National Art Museum's Western European art department, said the way the work was painted "leaves no doubt that it is a fake."

The chief curator at Moscow's famous Tretyakov Gallery, where a major Chagall exhibition ended Sunday, also expressed doubt, saying that an expert who was shown a photograph of what appeared to be the same painting believed it was not a real Chagall.

The curator, Yekaterina Seleznyova, also said that a painting that appeared to be the same one had been examined three times by the Marc Chagall Committee in Paris, which each time said it was not found to be authentic.

"The painting is certainly a fake," Meret Meyer-Graber, the artist's granddaughter and a vice president of the Chagall Committee with headquarters in Paris, told Belarus TV.

Lyudmila Kononova, however, continues to refute those claims. She said the painting's "special charm" is that it was executed on a piece of wood meant for an Orthodox Christian icon. She said Chagall painted it between 1910 and 1920 and gave it to an acquaintance. It had been in a private collection.

But Tamara Karandasheva claims that Chagall, did not begin painting his favorite character, roosters, symbolizing time, fire and the center of the Ritual of Atonement on the eve of Dies Irae, until 1926, in Paris.

Chagall was born in 1887 near the town of Vitebsk that is now in Belarus. In 1910 he moved to Paris to study arts and made friends with a circle of contemporary poets and painters. After World War I he returned to Vitebsk, got married and became the head of the Vitebsk Academy of Arts. In 1920 he moved to Moscow, and three years later to France again. After the beginning of World War II he left for the United States where he lived until his death in 1985.

Source:

http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/06/01/chagallcock.shtml