«And if now they ask me: “Why Chagall?” I will answer: "Because his aesthetic seems to me very close to that of La Fontaine, and in a certain sense related to it, at once dense and subtle, realistic and fantastic." » Ambroise Vollard, "L'intrasigeant", January 8, 1929
Inspired by the classical models of Aesop and Horace, La Fontaine's fables constitute one of the pinnacles of French literature. These moral exhortations, attempts at communication between human beings and nature, drink from various literary, Eastern and Western sources, to surrender to poetry with capital letters. Its protagonists, anthropomorphic animals, embody human society and reveal their soul with malicious delicacy and a sense of humor.

Presented for the first time in Paris in 1930 —by order of the French art dealer and gallery owner Ambroise Vollard— Marc Chagall's illustrations for these poems provoked virulent reactions, tinged with open anti-Semitism, from some critics of the time: «How could a Slavic Jew dared to approach the Latin soul?»; «Entrust the illustration of La Fontaine, a poet so essentially French, to a Russian, and to Chagall no less? What sacrilege!

Meanwhile, the other side of the public was discovering a new language, oneiric and colorful, which included a large part of the advances of the avant-garde and showed, in turn, the need for a revitalization of the French culture of the period. A totally renewed vision, freed from the contingencies of the time, restored in a background of humanity and legend.

This hardcover, cloth-backed edition brings back forty-three Chagall gouaches, most of them unpublished, which constitute a vital stretch of the artist in which his genius is reaffirmed as his notoriety grows. This volume also includes three essays that unravel the relationship between the artist's painting and classical icons and the critical reception of his work at the time.