 (1887 - 1985) Autour du couple, 1975 Signed ‘Marc Chagall’ (lower right corner) Oil, pen and ink on canvas 35 x 21,8 cm - 13.8 x 8.6 in. Provenance Private collection, Europe Acquired from the above by the previous owner Certificate The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work Public notes Marc Chagall through the 20th century had many life experiences that inspired his artwork: a combination of styles of the great masters (whose themes he tirelessly revisited) and images of life in Vitebsk, Judaism, the Bible, marriage, the family and the circus. Chagall was a dreamer. Whether his paintings depict people or animals, there’s always a feeling of weightlessness tipping the scales between protagonists and background. In Autour du couple (1975), the theme seems to be a married couple’s reputation and honour, a theme deeply ingrained in the artist’s upbringing. Couples are the privileged narrators of Chagall’s story. After his exile to France, the couple seems to represent the only stable social structure in existence, and the notion of the couple made Chagall feel safe. In his paintings, he often finds refuge in the concept of the family.
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Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985) Roi David sur fond rose, 1963 Signed ‘Marc Chagall’ (lower left corner) Oil and India ink on canvas 24 x 16 cm - 9.4 x 6.3 in. Provenance Private collection Certificate The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work Public notes During World War II, as a result of the Nazi occupation of France, in 1941 the Chagalls were forced to leave Paris, making their way to the United States which they made their home. However, after Bella’s death, bereaved and depressed Chagall returned to Europe and settled in Provence in 1949. At this point he met Virginia Haggard, with whom he had a son David, and in order to make money he began accepting theatrical commissions. He also began to work in sculpture, ceramics and stained glass. Remarrying in 1952 to Valentina Brodsky he travelled extensively to Greece and Israel and in 1960 he created the series of stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital in Jerusalem depicting Jacob’s blessings to his sons, the Twelve Tribes of Israel. Roi David sur fond rose is a product of this period of Chagall’s life. The main subject of King David, playing his lyre, overseeing the tribes and cities of the Kingdom of Israel is symptomatic of Chagall’s deep sense of identification with the whole of Jewish history. “All the time I was working I felt my father and my mother were looking over my shoulder, and behind them were Jews, millions of other vanished Jews of yesterday and a thousand years ago”. The embracing couple may be a reference to Bathsheba and Uriah and the birth of David’s child from Bathsheba. The linear, simplified, two-dimensional quality of the painting reflects his work with stained glass at this time; similarly the very translucent effect of the brushwork. The sinuous figures are typical of his work of this period, it has been suggested that having rediscovered the joy of living, post-bereavement, he expressed this with a free and vibrant use of colour and greater lightness and movement within the composition. Marc Chagall was a man of many parts, some conflicting. A Russian-Jew with French nationality, whose work quotes Christian iconography, a dreamer whose work touches on the harsh realities of war and persecution, an avant-garde artist yet unallied to any one particular movement.
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Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985) Soleil au-dessus de Vence, circa 1964 Signed ‘Marc Chagall’ (lower right corner); stamped ‘Estate of Marc Chagall’ (on the reverse) Oil on canvas and cardboard 51 x 41 cm - 20 x 16.1 in. Provenance The artist’s estate Private collection, Switzerland Private collection, Europe Certificate The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work Public notes “Throughout his life certain themes recur in the work of Chagall; the circus, lovers and peasants, take their place beside more sombre scenes of suffering and death...” (Susan Compton, Themes in the Work of Chagall, in Chagall, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p. 14). The couple or the bride flying above the town is one of these themes, which in the Soleil au-dessus de Vence from 1964 are accompanied with the familiar popular symbols of the red sun, the donkey, the cock and the peasant bringing his offering. This work is an exquisite example from the artist’s later work after his move to south France in 1950, when he bought a house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. “Chagall’s new sojourn in the south exerted a decisive influence on his art. The light, the vegetation, the rhythm of life all contributed to the rise of a more relaxed, airy, sensuous style in which the magic of colour dominates more and more with the passing of years” (Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 519). In this painting the red and blue colours enliven the village houses of Vence bathed in an intense yellow summer light. The daring and bold palette infuses the town with vibrancy typical of works from these years and particularly of those showing lovers or people close to the artist. The different themes of the painting combine in a fantastic invention which is stylistically compartmentalized - the bride and child positioned with the red sun at the centre above the town plane, divide the cock above a tree right and the peasant and donkey left into two separated sections. This compartmentalized composition as Mrs. Compton pointed out, is characteristic of Russian icons, “allowing the religious artist to include events, irrespective of a particular time or place, in scenes distributed over his picture surface in a unity of space in an allegorical sequence” (Susan Compton, ibid.). The allegorical meaning is a simple one and is set by the red sun placed behind the bride and child which according to common credence symbolizes the strength of love and its revitalizing force. The lovers theme which is constantly presented to the viewer in Chagall’s particular Russian idiom, is here reinterpreted, the village of Vitebsk is exchanged with that of Vence but the main motives of the original village remain - cock, donkey and peasant bringing his offering. The artists strong bond to his wife Bella and their only child is reinstated through the new intense colour and symbolic combination. This is possible because “the themes in Chagall’s art are timeless, not confined to a single epoch of history, but reminding man of the continuity in time” (Susan Compton, ibid.). O. Migdal
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Marc Chagall (1887 - 1985) Le Pont Neuf, 1953 - 1954 Signed ‘Marc Chagall’ (lower right corner) Oil on canvas 40,9 x 32,9 cm - 16.1 x 12.9 in. Provenance The artist’s estate Private collection Acquired from the above (Nov. 1999) Sale: Christie’s, New York, May 10, 2007, lot 298 Private collection, New York Certificate The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work Public notes Le Pont Neuf is part of a series of paintings dedicated to Paris that Marc Chagall planned in 1952, partly basing them on sketches he made during his stay in the city in 1946. Choosing the Pont Neuf as its central motif, the composition develops around it in a series of visions and symbols. On the left, a painter, with his head upside down, is standing in front of his easel while a purple bird peeps over to glimpse at the canvas. A bride, perhaps the model, or maybe just an imaginary muse bows to the artist, a bouquet of flowers in her hands. Below, a woman with flaming red hair and her baby are carried away on the back of a blue ox. Overlying his own pantheon of characters and creatures upon the Parisian cityscape, Le Pont Neuf evokes interweaved themes: artistic creation, marital devotion, fecundity and birth. Around the city of Paris, art, love and life dance in a circle. In 1954, twenty-nine paintings from the series were exhibited in Paris at the Galerie Maeght. The project spurred an unprecedented numbers of preparatory drawings and also engendered two groups of lithographs: one inspired by the sketches, published in Verve in 1952; the other produced from the paintings, published in Derrière le Miroir in 1954. This wealth of works underlines Chagall’s strong connection with the Parisian universe in those years: “Paris is a picture already painted”, he wrote (Marc Chagall, quoted in Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1963, p. 529). The subject introduced a new painterly experience to his works, expanding colours into overlapping fields. In Le Pont Neuf, the landscape and the figures emerge from a zone of open green as symphonies of memories inspired by the tonality. Besides his native town Vitebsk, no other city received so much attention in Chagall’s oeuvre as Paris. Vitebsk having been destroyed during the Second World War, Chagall seems to present Paris as the new space where the artist’s inner