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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Comité Marc Chagall.
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, 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 Derrère 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 (M. Chagall, quoted in F. 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 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 reality can survive. After having been abruptly left by his lover Virginia - who ran away with their son David - in 1952 Chagall married 'Vava' (Valentine Brodsky). The wedding brought Chagall the serenity he needed to work, embracing new ambitious projects. While the 1950s saw Chagall working on large-scale murals, mosaics and stained glasses, Pont Neuf and the Paris series reaffirmed the intimate world of personal visions, symbols and love that characterise Chagall's pictorial universe.
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, 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 Derrère 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 (M. Chagall, quoted in F. 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 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 reality can survive. After having been abruptly left by his lover Virginia - who ran away with their son David - in 1952 Chagall married 'Vava' (Valentine Brodsky). The wedding brought Chagall the serenity he needed to work, embracing new ambitious projects. While the 1950s saw Chagall working on large-scale murals, mosaics and stained glasses, Pont Neuf and the Paris series reaffirmed the intimate world of personal visions, symbols and love that characterise Chagall's pictorial universe.