Le buisson rose

The Comit Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this painting
A glorious celebration of bright and radiant colour, Le buisson rose exemplifies Russian-born artist Marc Chagall's distinctive artistic vision. Renowned for creating poetic images filled with the themes of memory, love, nostalgia and fantasy, Chagall's compositions often feature an array of floating figures and symbols in dreamlike settings; figments of the artist's memory and imagination. Within an imaginary landscape, a pink, flowering tree is surrounded by some of the most emblematic motifs of Chagall's oeuvre: a floating figure of a fiddler, the simply rendered forms of two animals and a small cabin, all important symbols of Chagall's heritage in rural Russia.
The image of a mother and child in the lower right of Le buisson rose also pays homage to the artist's Russian origins. She is Mother Russia; Chagall is the child at her breast. Taking inspiration from the powerful tradition of Russian icons, Chagall first painted his own Madonna and Childin 1911(Meyer, no.129). He would further use this resonating motif to represent the innocent victims and atrocities of the Second World War as he painted as an exile in America in the 1940s.
Painted circa 1975-1980, Le buisson rose comes from a period of stability and contentment in Chagall's life. Chagall was born in the Russian (now Belarusian) town of Vitebsk, but spent much of his life in France. In 1950, Chagall moved to Saint-Paul-de-Vence, a pictur esque hilltop town in Provence, an area in the South of France, and was joined two years later by his new wife, Valentina Brodsky, whom he married in 1952. After the Second World War, the French Riviera emerged as a thriving artistic centre, inhabited by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, with whom Chagall became good friends. The couple lived in a house called 'Les Collines', and amidst this idyllic natural setting, surrounded by fruit trees, lush foliage and vineyards, Chagall experienced a period of great happiness which is reflected in the light and loosely sensuous style of his work from this period, such as can be seen in Le buisson rose.
Under the brilliant light of the C?te d'Azur, the colours of Chagall's painting became stronger and more intense. Bursting with fantastical, radiant tones of yellow and deep shades of blue and green, Le buisson rose demonstrates the artist's ardent love and bold use of colour. For Chagall, colour had more than just a descriptive, pictorial role, but had an autobiographical and deeply personal significance; he emphatically stated in 1973, a few years before the present work was painted, 'Colour is purity. Colour is art. Pure art. Or its fundamental intonationBut one must undoubtedly be born with colour. If I love Vitebsk so much it is not only because I was born there but because it was there that I found my colour'(Chagall quoted in J. Baal- Teshuva, ed., Chagall, A Retrospective, exh. cat., New York, 1995, p. 322). Le buisson rose presents a joyous depiction of Chagall's distinctive artistic style, a personal and poetic image of the artist's vivid imagination.