Sorry for the small reproduction – the only one I could find on the web – but can anyone read the word above Chagall’s name in this image? Even at poster size it baffles me.
Payne?
Well I’ve got no chance of reading it if I lurk from a PDA It’s the size of a stamp!
I don’t think it’s Payne: more likely it’s something French (Chagall’s language as an artist).
Obviously the image size is a problem. My best guess so far is “fugue” but Googling hasn’t turned up much.
Alexander Payne is a very famous French director.
Really? No whoosh? The only Alexander Payne I know about is a film director, but he’s American – not to mention a good deal younger than Chagall.
Sorry I am an idiot. I found Paris, je t’aime on a french web site with payne listed as the director. With my poor french I thought he was French from my reading of the site. I was wrong. Sorry. I still think it says Payne on the poster. But that’s not based on anything but my viewing of your link. Basically you can disregard anything I say, it is late and I was just trying to help. Apparently poorly…
but it was not a whoooosh.
Thank you for not whooshing me. (You could’ve, you know; I’m pretty gullible.)
I think I’ll take a photo of my poster (yes, it’s hanging in my living room, and I’m embarrassed that I can’t read my own wall) so I can zoom and enlarge. Even with my meager photographic skills I can probably get something legible.
I can’t make anything of it at this size, but it looks tantalizingly like it could be Hebrew script… if you can get a larger image I’ll be able to confirm or deny this.
It looks like it might be something in Russian.
Do you know the name of this image?
It’s Urdu!
Just kidding. Is it possible it says “payer” or “payeur”? That’s French for pay and payer, respectively. It’s awfully small, but I’m not really seeing Payne.
He was a Russian Jew by birth so as others have suggested, don’t assume it’s French.
I’m reading “Per Jane”, but I am notoriously blind as a bat and bad at handwriting. And Google doesn’t turn up anything about Jane, so I’m probably completely wrong.
Could it be Jayne?
Longshot: “Mary Jayne Gold was an American socialite who helped painters Marc Chagall, Max Ernst and about 2,000 other Jews and anti-Nazis escape from France during World War II.”
Apparently, it was originally done as a poster for La Bibliotheque Nationale (of Paris) in 1970. However, all of the copies of the poster that I have found online don’t show the additional word above the artist’s signature or, in fact, the signature itself.
If you do a search on “la bibliotheque nationale” (which is the only name I have found for this) and “chagall” you can find many copies of this online but not with the writing.
I took a picture of the word in question and posted it online.
Can anyone read it? I doubt the writing is Cyrillic or Hebrew, but I’m happy to be surprised.
Thanks again,
E.
My hunch was right – it’s “Chagall” in Hebrew – שאגאל. 
ETA: I left you a comment on the Flickr photograph, too.
Thanks! I wouldn’t have guessed that in a million years.
Given my obvious ignorance of Hebrew: I’d always thought/heard that the Hebrew language was written without its vowels. Is that not true?
Mssd th dt wndw…
Seems it’s ancient Hebrew that was written vowelless. Right?
Ignorance fought. Many thanks to all who squinted at the first image and to Noone Special who so quickly deciphered the second.