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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Comité Marc Chagall.
Transforming a bouquet of flowers into a magical cloud of colour enveloping an angel, L’Ange dans les fleurs introduces a new narrative in Marc Chagall’s floral paintings. Looking up, a hand raised in a gesture of wonder, a figure welcomes the marvellous vision of an angel, dancing down from the night sky, amid a fragrant group of flowers and tender leaves.
L’Ange dans les fleurs was executed by Chagall around 1925-1926. In the 1920s, Chagall had been juxtaposing flowers to images of lovers, turning the bouquet – a traditional emblem of lovers’ first encounters – into a symbol of union and devotion. With L’Ange dans les fleurs, Chagall permeated that theme with mythic, almost biblical undertones, merging the carnal image of a lover with the spiritual figure of the angel and thereby expressing his near-religious belief in love. Using thick gouache, while exploiting the luminous transparencies of watercolour, Chagall has created a brilliant surface which successfully evokes the silvery, cold glow of a moonlit night.
Remembering the 1920s – the decade in which L’Ange dans les fleurs was executed – Chagall affirmed that it was ‘the happiest time of [his] life’ (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall, Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 333). In 1923 Chagall had returned to Paris beginning an artistic collaboration and a lasting friendship with Ambroise Vollard, for whom the artist illustrated Gogol’s Les Ames mortes and La Fontaine’s Fables. By 1926 the artist had signed a contract with the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune Gallery and was complacently observing that his works were bought as soon as his signature had dried (cf. Ibid., p. 326). That year, with his wife Bella and daughter Ida, Chagall travelled to Southern France, discovering the light and colours of the Mediterranean coast. Transferring the sea’s electric blues to the atmosphere of a magical night, L’Ange dans les fleurs conveys the positive, enchanted outlook that characterised Chagall’s life in France at the time. Celebrating the theme of love, while evoking a dreamy world of marvellous creatures, the work contributed to Chagall’s quest to create an art faithful to his life, yet reaching beyond mere reality: ‘It is my whole life that is identified with my work’, Chagall once said, ‘and it seems to me that I am the same one even when I am sleeping’ (quoted in Ibid., p. 333).
Transforming a bouquet of flowers into a magical cloud of colour enveloping an angel, L’Ange dans les fleurs introduces a new narrative in Marc Chagall’s floral paintings. Looking up, a hand raised in a gesture of wonder, a figure welcomes the marvellous vision of an angel, dancing down from the night sky, amid a fragrant group of flowers and tender leaves.
L’Ange dans les fleurs was executed by Chagall around 1925-1926. In the 1920s, Chagall had been juxtaposing flowers to images of lovers, turning the bouquet – a traditional emblem of lovers’ first encounters – into a symbol of union and devotion. With L’Ange dans les fleurs, Chagall permeated that theme with mythic, almost biblical undertones, merging the carnal image of a lover with the spiritual figure of the angel and thereby expressing his near-religious belief in love. Using thick gouache, while exploiting the luminous transparencies of watercolour, Chagall has created a brilliant surface which successfully evokes the silvery, cold glow of a moonlit night.
Remembering the 1920s – the decade in which L’Ange dans les fleurs was executed – Chagall affirmed that it was ‘the happiest time of [his] life’ (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall, Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 333). In 1923 Chagall had returned to Paris beginning an artistic collaboration and a lasting friendship with Ambroise Vollard, for whom the artist illustrated Gogol’s Les Ames mortes and La Fontaine’s Fables. By 1926 the artist had signed a contract with the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune Gallery and was complacently observing that his works were bought as soon as his signature had dried (cf. Ibid., p. 326). That year, with his wife Bella and daughter Ida, Chagall travelled to Southern France, discovering the light and colours of the Mediterranean coast. Transferring the sea’s electric blues to the atmosphere of a magical night, L’Ange dans les fleurs conveys the positive, enchanted outlook that characterised Chagall’s life in France at the time. Celebrating the theme of love, while evoking a dreamy world of marvellous creatures, the work contributed to Chagall’s quest to create an art faithful to his life, yet reaching beyond mere reality: ‘It is my whole life that is identified with my work’, Chagall once said, ‘and it seems to me that I am the same one even when I am sleeping’ (quoted in Ibid., p. 333).