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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Le souvenir was painted in 1970-75, and is filled with the reignited radiance of Marc Chagall's works of that period. It was in post-war France that Chagall found himself in great demand to design stained glass windows. This was in part because of his unique, whimsical, romantic, nostalgia-infused pictorial universe, which straddled Russia and France, the religious and the secular. The experience of this resulted in a new fire to his palette, reflected both in the vivid colours of the flowers bunched in Le souvenir and in the general, hazy sky of the background. This image, with a man floating above a town while a woman sits, contemplative, in the lower left-hand corner, is filled with that sense of magic and romance that makes his paintings sing with both a spiritual and a colourist glow. Flowers, lovers, memories, desires... All these combined to create these visions of beauty. Chagall's inspired visions were profoundly rooted in his early Russian iconography. His native village of Vitebsk became Paris, Paris became Saint-Paul-de-Vence: all'places of the heart', mental landscapes, epitomising each time his enthusiastic panism. Chagall's chromatic exuberance is the stylistic cypher of his philosophy: a fundamentally optmistic, generous, altruistic Weltanschauung, which reached its apogee in his more mature years.
The present picture has all the symbolic syntax of Chagall's magic imaginary world: the explosive bouquets, the silhouette of a village, the lover, and the man-farmer. These remained the archetypes of his best works, particulary in his very productive and inspired years in provence.
Le souvenir was painted in 1970-75, and is filled with the reignited radiance of Marc Chagall's works of that period. It was in post-war France that Chagall found himself in great demand to design stained glass windows. This was in part because of his unique, whimsical, romantic, nostalgia-infused pictorial universe, which straddled Russia and France, the religious and the secular. The experience of this resulted in a new fire to his palette, reflected both in the vivid colours of the flowers bunched in Le souvenir and in the general, hazy sky of the background. This image, with a man floating above a town while a woman sits, contemplative, in the lower left-hand corner, is filled with that sense of magic and romance that makes his paintings sing with both a spiritual and a colourist glow. Flowers, lovers, memories, desires... All these combined to create these visions of beauty. Chagall's inspired visions were profoundly rooted in his early Russian iconography. His native village of Vitebsk became Paris, Paris became Saint-Paul-de-Vence: all'places of the heart', mental landscapes, epitomising each time his enthusiastic panism. Chagall's chromatic exuberance is the stylistic cypher of his philosophy: a fundamentally optmistic, generous, altruistic Weltanschauung, which reached its apogee in his more mature years.
The present picture has all the symbolic syntax of Chagall's magic imaginary world: the explosive bouquets, the silhouette of a village, the lover, and the man-farmer. These remained the archetypes of his best works, particulary in his very productive and inspired years in provence.