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Case file s1926 · Literature and art · 1985
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1985
Marc Chagall: Shagal Choumoff
Marc Chagall. Pierre Choumoff. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Died
28 March 1985
Place
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France
Field
painter · Visual art and architecture on the timeline
Legal tradition
French civil law · Civil law
Historical event
The French dation system, which lets heirs pay inheritance tax in art
Religion
Marc Chagall: Jewish (recorded as 20th-century Russian Jews, Jewish Russian painters, Soviet Jews on Wikipedia)
Member of
Comité national de l'estampe, Royal Academy of Arts, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, Accademia delle Arti del Disegno (Wikidata)
Literature and artBurned papers and destroyed workSeized by the statePostwarEuropeFrance

Chagall's heirs paid his death duties with 46 paintings and 406 drawings, and his granddaughters' committee seized a £100,000 fake to destroy it

Marc Chagall died on 28 March 1985, aged 97. His heirs were his widow Valentina "Vava" Brodsky, his daughter Ida by his first wife Bella, and his son David McNeil by Virginia Haggard†. They settled the French inheritance tax by dation: the state accepted 46 paintings and 406 drawings and gouaches, with almost all his illustrated books. The Centre Pompidou showed the works from 30 March to 5 June 1988, and the Chagall museum in Nice showed 147 of them that summer. Authenticity is ruled on by the Chagall Committee in Paris, headed by Chagall's two granddaughters. In 1992 Martin Lang of Leeds paid £100,000 for a nude said to date from 1909 to 1910. In 2014 the BBC programme Fake or Fortune? sent it to the committee, and tests found pigments not made until the 1930s. The committee called it a very bad copy of a 1911 nude, kept it, and said French law allowed it to be destroyed. It said it would not destroy a work without the owner's consent or a court order. Lang said it was his property, fake or not, and asked for it back marked as a forgery. Whether it was destroyed is not confirmed†. In 2013 French courts had ordered fakes attributed to Joan Miró destroyed in two cases.

What the law took from it

Heirs who control an artist's authentication control the market in his work, including the power to have it burned.

Sources
  1. centrepompidou.frPress
  2. prod.centrepompidou.frPress
  3. timesofisrael.comPress
  4. arthistorynews.comPress
  5. apollo-magazine.comPress
  6. thetvdb.comPress

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “Chagall's heirs paid his death duties with 46 paintings and 406 drawings, and his granddaughters' committee seized a £100,000 fake to destroy it,” story s1926, https://www.celebrity.estate/chagall-1985, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

Literature and artBurned papers and destroyed workSeized by the statePostwarEuropeCivil lawFrance