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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
'These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have made themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colours and make-up, I dream of painting new psychic distortions' (Chagall, quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall: A Retrospective, Westport, 1995, p. 195).
Painted in 1971, Au cirque is a colourful picture filled with all the activity and entertainment of the circus, one of Marc Chagall's most favoured themes. This picture, created on an intimate scale that makes the colours all the more jewel-like in their intensity, is packed with characters, from the girl performing tricks on a pony riding around the ring to the clown with flowers, alongside musicians, a trapeze artist and of course the audience itself. The presence of the bunch of blooms in the hands of the clown allows Chagall to include one of his most celebrated motifs while also adding an extra dynamism to the intense colourism with which this picture is suffused.
Au cirque was painted during the post-war period, when Chagall's love of colour took on a new vibrancy, in part informed by his experiences in creating stained glass windows; this is clear to see in the reds, the yellows and the rich, lapis-like blues of this picture. This, then, is a reinvigoration and reincarnation of a theme that Chagall had first tackled some decades earlier. Indeed, it was in 1927 that the artist had been commissioned by his friend, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, to create a series of circus-themed pictures. In so doing, Chagall was tapping into the visual language of the avant garde in Paris, taking on the challenge laid down by Picasso's harlequins and performers as well as the clowns of Georges Rouault.
Those precedents were crucial for Chagall. The performers in the ring are proxies for the artists themselves, examining their own activities and the scrutiny of their viewers, collectors, their audience. For Chagall, the circus had a tragi-comic dimension, based in part on his own memories of impoverished rural performers bringing their artificial magic and illusions to Vitebsk when he was a child and also on the role of the artist itself, through which one is placed on a precarious pedestal. Indeed, for Chagall, even the human need for entertainment had a dark side in that it showed some shortage of joy in life itself. That complicated legacy came to the fore in Chagall's post-war pictures on this subject. 'Alas, in my lifetime I have seen a grotesque circus,' he wrote. 'A man roared to terrify the world and the thunder of applause answered him' (Chagall, in ibid., p. 197). However, in Au cirque, it is the release, the joy, that appears to be the primary driver. This enchanting vision in its highly-keyed colours is a celebration of the circus, of the versatile performers whom Chagall himself was known to visit and watch, enthralled, on every occasion possible. It is only apt that he discussed the circus in terms that might be seen as equally applicable to his own pictures: 'It is in the circus that eccentricity and simplicity blend most naturally' (Chagall, ibid., p. 324).
'These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have made themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colours and make-up, I dream of painting new psychic distortions' (Chagall, quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall: A Retrospective, Westport, 1995, p. 195).
Painted in 1971, Au cirque is a colourful picture filled with all the activity and entertainment of the circus, one of Marc Chagall's most favoured themes. This picture, created on an intimate scale that makes the colours all the more jewel-like in their intensity, is packed with characters, from the girl performing tricks on a pony riding around the ring to the clown with flowers, alongside musicians, a trapeze artist and of course the audience itself. The presence of the bunch of blooms in the hands of the clown allows Chagall to include one of his most celebrated motifs while also adding an extra dynamism to the intense colourism with which this picture is suffused.
Au cirque was painted during the post-war period, when Chagall's love of colour took on a new vibrancy, in part informed by his experiences in creating stained glass windows; this is clear to see in the reds, the yellows and the rich, lapis-like blues of this picture. This, then, is a reinvigoration and reincarnation of a theme that Chagall had first tackled some decades earlier. Indeed, it was in 1927 that the artist had been commissioned by his friend, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, to create a series of circus-themed pictures. In so doing, Chagall was tapping into the visual language of the avant garde in Paris, taking on the challenge laid down by Picasso's harlequins and performers as well as the clowns of Georges Rouault.
Those precedents were crucial for Chagall. The performers in the ring are proxies for the artists themselves, examining their own activities and the scrutiny of their viewers, collectors, their audience. For Chagall, the circus had a tragi-comic dimension, based in part on his own memories of impoverished rural performers bringing their artificial magic and illusions to Vitebsk when he was a child and also on the role of the artist itself, through which one is placed on a precarious pedestal. Indeed, for Chagall, even the human need for entertainment had a dark side in that it showed some shortage of joy in life itself. That complicated legacy came to the fore in Chagall's post-war pictures on this subject. 'Alas, in my lifetime I have seen a grotesque circus,' he wrote. 'A man roared to terrify the world and the thunder of applause answered him' (Chagall, in ibid., p. 197). However, in Au cirque, it is the release, the joy, that appears to be the primary driver. This enchanting vision in its highly-keyed colours is a celebration of the circus, of the versatile performers whom Chagall himself was known to visit and watch, enthralled, on every occasion possible. It is only apt that he discussed the circus in terms that might be seen as equally applicable to his own pictures: 'It is in the circus that eccentricity and simplicity blend most naturally' (Chagall, ibid., p. 324).