Chagall's Four Tails from the Arabian Nights

In the spring of 1946, Marc Chagall was in exile in the United States as the war was drawing to a close. He was accorded the singular honor of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In the fall he returned to his home in High Falls, New York in the Catskill Mountains where he began work on commission for a suite of thirteen colored lithographs to illustrate the Arabian Nights. These were Chagall's very first color prints. As with his etchings he began this project with studies in gouache. He then worked over the litho stones in great detail to create color as luminous and opulent as possible.

The Arabian Nights

“Is it possible, that by telling these tales,
one might indeed save one’s self?”

The character, Scheherezade thought so. In fact, she tells each of the Arabian Nights tales in order to survive a little longer at the mercy of her listener, the Sultan.

The Arabian Nights stories are some of the world’s great treasures. They have existed for thousands of years, consisting of tales told in Persia, Arabia, India and Asia. The Arabian Nights (also known as The 1001 Arabian Nights) have inspired writers the world over with the ancient power of story.

There are versions of these stories in many languages and they all convey the great sense of adventure, truth, fantastic imagination, justice, and faith embodied by the great civilizations that contributed stories and ideas to the collection.

The Arabian Nights include fairy tales, fables, romances, farces, legends, and parables. The tales use a sweeping variety of settings, including Baghdad, Basrah, Cairo and Damascus, as well as China, Greece, India, North Africa and Turkey.

These fanciful, sometimes brutal tales, revel in the art of storytelling. The underlying suggestion of the Arabian Nights is that a fantastically precious jewel exists which, when it comes into contact with people, actually changes them. The jewel is the magnificently powerful art of story. There may not be any better examples in the world of how art, trickery, magic and craft can swirl together and form a world that every reader and listener wants to enter. Regardless of the situation presented in any particular Arabian Nights story, the assumption contained in the story is that life is always worth living and that human endeavor, along with human weakness, is a wonderful and fascinating thing to behold. These stories form a powerful mental connection between the ancient civilizations of the East and those of the West. Moreso than any other piece of writing in history, these stories illustrate that the minds of the East and of the West consider carefully the same subject matter.