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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
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 died from a viral infection in 1944, while they were living in upstate New York during the Second World War. 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, and 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, which had become the central vault in the great storehouse of his boundless imagination. In the present painting, Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, float over Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the hilltop town in Provence that the artist made his home in 1950. 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" (Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).
Part of this enduring immersion in Bella's memory was any man's nostalgia for the great love of his youth. Chagall was fortunate enough to have married his first true love, and he cultivated these wonderful memories like an ever mindful gardener. He wrote a detailed narrative of his life as a young man in two versions. The artist titled the early text My Own World, which he wrote in Yiddish and completed in 1924. He dedicated it to an unlikely combination, "For Rembrandt, Cézanne, My mother, My wife." He subsequently revised and completed it, with Bella helping to translate it into French, as Ma Vie, "My Life," which was published in 1931.
Arbre bleu is Chagall's poignant evocation of Bella the departed one, the experience of her loss and her transfiguration. She is a pale but unmistakable presence cast in the whiteness of an apparition, summoned forth from the vast blueness of infinite time and space, and translated to the present, so that both Chagall and his beloved embrace as they did long ago, floating above the world, still in it, but not bound to it by normal earthly forces. It is a remarkable vision, all the more amazing because it appears as if it were merely one aspect of the grand view that Chagall would have beheld from his villa Les Collines overlooking Vence.
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 died from a viral infection in 1944, while they were living in upstate New York during the Second World War. 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, and 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, which had become the central vault in the great storehouse of his boundless imagination. In the present painting, Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, float over Saint-Paul-de-Vence, the hilltop town in Provence that the artist made his home in 1950. 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" (Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).
Part of this enduring immersion in Bella's memory was any man's nostalgia for the great love of his youth. Chagall was fortunate enough to have married his first true love, and he cultivated these wonderful memories like an ever mindful gardener. He wrote a detailed narrative of his life as a young man in two versions. The artist titled the early text My Own World, which he wrote in Yiddish and completed in 1924. He dedicated it to an unlikely combination, "For Rembrandt, Cézanne, My mother, My wife." He subsequently revised and completed it, with Bella helping to translate it into French, as Ma Vie, "My Life," which was published in 1931.
Arbre bleu is Chagall's poignant evocation of Bella the departed one, the experience of her loss and her transfiguration. She is a pale but unmistakable presence cast in the whiteness of an apparition, summoned forth from the vast blueness of infinite time and space, and translated to the present, so that both Chagall and his beloved embrace as they did long ago, floating above the world, still in it, but not bound to it by normal earthly forces. It is a remarkable vision, all the more amazing because it appears as if it were merely one aspect of the grand view that Chagall would have beheld from his villa Les Collines overlooking Vence.