018 - Le Cirque (M.527), 1967

"Le Cirque (M.527)," the final plate from Marc Chagall's renowned Circus suite brings the sweeping and energetic series to a close with a musician's serenade. "Le Cirque (M.527)" is a lithograph on paper created by Marc Chagall in 1967. The artwork is signed 'Marc Chagall' lower right and annotated lower left. The artwork is framed in a custom closed-corner gold-leaf frame with Optium plexiglass and has a framed size of 29 x 24". The artwork ships framed and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

"My circus plays in the sky.
It plays in the clouds, and plays among the chairs.
It plays in the window that reflects the moon.

Along the street passes a man.
He puts out the lights of the echoes of the city.
The performance is over." - Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall’s "Le Cirque" is a story that waited nearly forty years to be told. Ambroise Vollard first encouraged Chagall’s circus project in the mid-to-late 1920s, around 1926–1927, when the dealer gave him access to his box at the Cirque d’Hiver. Chagall completed 19 gouaches for the projected "Cirque Vollard," but the publication was never realized. Decades later, the idea resurfaced in the 1967 "Le Cirque" lithographic suite, published by Tériade.

The completed portfolio contains 38 lithographs: 23 in color, including three double-page compositions, and 15 in black. A separate suite of the 23 color lithographs was also printed with wide margins in an edition of only 24, plus a few proofs and hors-commerce impressions. Each sheet in that special suite was individually signed and numbered by Chagall. This distinction is important: the regular book edition was signed on the justification page, but not on each lithograph. These individually signed, wide-margin color impressions are much scarcer and more desirable as stand-alone works.

There are artists who depict the circus as spectacle, and artists who understand it as a metaphor for life itself. Chagall belonged to the second group. For him, the circus was not merely a ring, a tent, a clown, or an acrobat. It was a floating world where gravity loosens, music becomes color, and the everyday body is allowed to become miraculous. In "Le Cirque," the performer is never just a performer. The acrobat becomes an angel, the clown becomes a poet, the horse becomes a companion from childhood memory, and the audience becomes a constellation of witnesses.

"Le Cirque" carries a particularly poignant magic. As the final color plate of the suite, it feels like a closing song. A musician sits at the center, flute raised, dressed in Chagall’s greens, reds, yellows, blues, and whites. His costume is not rendered as ordinary clothing, but as a lyrical surface where circus decoration, nature, music, and memory overlap. The abstracted marks and colors across his body suggest embroidery, leaves, stage light, and melody, without resolving into a single fixed symbol. Chagall lets the costume become visual music.

Around him, line-drawn performers and spectators hover like fading memories: a standing female figure at left, small acrobats at right, and a crescent moon above. The space is airy and open, almost like a curtain call after the crowd has begun to disappear. The spectacle has quieted, but the music remains.

This is what gives "Le Cirque" its emotional force. It is not a grand finale of noise and movement, but a serenade. The circus world Chagall carried from Vollard’s Paris into his own late style is gathered into one final image of tenderness, fantasy, and release. If "M.521" is the breath before the performance, "Le Cirque" is the song after the lights begin to dim: the artist’s farewell to the ring.