Monday, December 14, 2009

The Salz family visits Marc Chagall.

In the summer of the early sixties(1962), the Salz family went to visit Marc Chagall and his wife at his home near Saint Paul de Vence in the South Of France. My father had been Chagall's early principal dealer and showed his portraits of rabbis in his gallery in Germany in the thirties. This did get him into trouble with the current Nazi party and the name of Sam Salz was put on their list as a Jew. Two of the paintings my father had at the time were Chagall's " Birthday" and "Over Vitebsk" which he sold and later were bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My father then left for America and began what was to become his art business there. The reunion in 1962 was one of old friends who came from the same type of Eastern European Jewish backgrounds. They both spoke Yiddish but were largely non observant when it came to religion. The photo above is one of the two men coming down from the stairs of Chagall's home while my brother Andre and myself waited below. It was then that my father asked Marc Chagall: "These boys are about to have their Bar Mitzvahs. Is there anything that you can give them?". Chagall then replied with a kiss on each of our foreheads. Blessed to paint.

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