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Lot Essay
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds, people caught up in the early excitement of love, who have abandoned themselves to love, and have completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella, who were married in 1915 and lived together for almost three decades, this experience of love took a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade.
It came as a devastating blow to Chagall when Bella suffered an early and unnecessary death from a viral infection in 1944, while they were living in upstate New York during the Second World War. Penicillin could have saved her, but this new drug had been set aside solely for military use. Chagall's adoration for Bella grew even greater following her passing, and he continued to celebrate her impact on his life in many paintings. He had an extended liaison during the late 1940s and early 1950s with Virginia Haggard McNeil and fathered a son by her. He married again in 1952, this time to Valentine ("Vava") Brodsky, after a courtship that lasted only a few months. The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, could never upstage the power of the mythic eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella, or diminish those feelings now permanently fixed within the artist's mind, the central vault in the great storehouse of his boundless imagination. In the present painting, executed the year of his marriage to Vava but short of a decade after Bella's death, Chagall reverentially depicts his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, betrothed again, floating in a heavenly moonlit blue sky. As Sidney Alexander has written:
Chagall and Bella remained lovers, though married; monogamous but not monotonous; lovers to the end, in a story so felicitous as to offer little drama to the biographer or novelist. Out of this domestic Eden, lived and remembered, poured an endless series of painted epithalamia: Bella as goddess, Bella as Venus, Bella as Bathsheba; Bella as the Shulamite of the Song of Songs; Bella as bride in her sperm-spurting gown, a sex comet; Bella as a white whish of rocket soaring toward the moon Even after her death (when he was living with Virginia) whenever he painted a bride it was Bella; whenever he painted a bridal veil it referred to Bella (in Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).
It came as a devastating blow to Chagall when Bella suffered an early and unnecessary death from a viral infection in 1944, while they were living in upstate New York during the Second World War. Penicillin could have saved her, but this new drug had been set aside solely for military use. Chagall's adoration for Bella grew even greater following her passing, and he continued to celebrate her impact on his life in many paintings. He had an extended liaison during the late 1940s and early 1950s with Virginia Haggard McNeil and fathered a son by her. He married again in 1952, this time to Valentine ("Vava") Brodsky, after a courtship that lasted only a few months. The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, could never upstage the power of the mythic eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella, or diminish those feelings now permanently fixed within the artist's mind, the central vault in the great storehouse of his boundless imagination. In the present painting, executed the year of his marriage to Vava but short of a decade after Bella's death, Chagall reverentially depicts his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, betrothed again, floating in a heavenly moonlit blue sky. As Sidney Alexander has written:
Chagall and Bella remained lovers, though married; monogamous but not monotonous; lovers to the end, in a story so felicitous as to offer little drama to the biographer or novelist. Out of this domestic Eden, lived and remembered, poured an endless series of painted epithalamia: Bella as goddess, Bella as Venus, Bella as Bathsheba; Bella as the Shulamite of the Song of Songs; Bella as bride in her sperm-spurting gown, a sex comet; Bella as a white whish of rocket soaring toward the moon Even after her death (when he was living with Virginia) whenever he painted a bride it was Bella; whenever he painted a bridal veil it referred to Bella (in Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).