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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Chagall always remembered an incident going back to his years as a young man in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, when he looked on as a father and his young children, members of an indigent family hoping to earn a few pennies for bread, performed on the street some clumsy but strenuous acrobatic stunts. He watched sadly as they afterwards walked away, unappreciated and empty-handed. Chagall must have pondered that this might similarly become the fate of anyone who fancied for himself the life of an artist: “It seemed as if I had been the one bowing up there” (from Chagall’s 1967 text Le Cirque, trans. Patsy Southgate, in Chagall, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1981, n.p.).
The experience of circus performance—clowns, acrobats, young ladies riding bareback horses, the little orchestra in the balcony, the ringside stands brimming with spectators, the total spectacle, in all its colorful variety—served Chagall as the compelling metaphor for the life he decided to lead. The vision and dream of the circus lay at the very heart of his personal mythology.
The primary attraction for Chagall in any circus, great or small, was the girl on a horse. “All seem to be assembled here only for the glory of the bareback rider, her scintillation, the incitement of her revolutions,” Louis Aragon wrote of Chagall’s circus scenes. “We are caught up in the movement of the woman circling the ring, she whose beauty is the beauty of danger, waiting for her to come around again, until all the men watching with bated breath reach the point of being jealous of the horse” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, pp. 195-196).
Chagall’s rider is an irresistible beauty, hardly more than a girl, who balances triumphant atop her mount, which—given the inconsistencies of scale that are commonplace in this artist’s magical world—is usually smaller than the rider herself, so lovely and larger than life was she in the artist’s infatuated gaze.
“I would like to go up to that bareback rider who has just reappeared, smiling; her dress, a bouquet of flowers,” Chagall wrote in Le Cirque. “I would circle her with my flowered and unflowered years. On my knees, I would tell her my wishes and dreams, not of this world. I would run after her to ask her how to live, how to escape from myself, from the world, whom to run to, where to go” (op. cit., 1981).
Compared to Vitebsk, Paris in the early years of the 20th century was a circus-goer’s paradise, and when Chagall first arrived there in June 1911 he discovered the far more exciting and artful professionals who drew crowds at the famed Cirque Médrano on the edge of Montmartre and the Cirque d’Hiver in the 11ème arrondissement. He joined a long and distinguished line of painters working in France who featured the circus in their work, stemming from Watteau—a favorite of Chagall—and thereafter including Daumier, Degas, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and among his immediate contemporaries, Picasso, Rouault, Van Dongen and Léger.
The circus subjects that Chagall developed during the 1920s and 1930s continued to bear fruit for the next half century of his astonishingly long career. Notwithstanding the irrepressible high spirits that everywhere burst forth in Le petit cirque bleu, Chagall inwardly perceived a more serious, “blue” intimation in this spectacle, in thoughts that pervade his homage to the circus:
“For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound... These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have themselves at home in my visions... It is a magic word, circus, a timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of a great art...” (ibid.).
Chagall always remembered an incident going back to his years as a young man in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, when he looked on as a father and his young children, members of an indigent family hoping to earn a few pennies for bread, performed on the street some clumsy but strenuous acrobatic stunts. He watched sadly as they afterwards walked away, unappreciated and empty-handed. Chagall must have pondered that this might similarly become the fate of anyone who fancied for himself the life of an artist: “It seemed as if I had been the one bowing up there” (from Chagall’s 1967 text Le Cirque, trans. Patsy Southgate, in Chagall, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1981, n.p.).
The experience of circus performance—clowns, acrobats, young ladies riding bareback horses, the little orchestra in the balcony, the ringside stands brimming with spectators, the total spectacle, in all its colorful variety—served Chagall as the compelling metaphor for the life he decided to lead. The vision and dream of the circus lay at the very heart of his personal mythology.
The primary attraction for Chagall in any circus, great or small, was the girl on a horse. “All seem to be assembled here only for the glory of the bareback rider, her scintillation, the incitement of her revolutions,” Louis Aragon wrote of Chagall’s circus scenes. “We are caught up in the movement of the woman circling the ring, she whose beauty is the beauty of danger, waiting for her to come around again, until all the men watching with bated breath reach the point of being jealous of the horse” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, pp. 195-196).
Chagall’s rider is an irresistible beauty, hardly more than a girl, who balances triumphant atop her mount, which—given the inconsistencies of scale that are commonplace in this artist’s magical world—is usually smaller than the rider herself, so lovely and larger than life was she in the artist’s infatuated gaze.
“I would like to go up to that bareback rider who has just reappeared, smiling; her dress, a bouquet of flowers,” Chagall wrote in Le Cirque. “I would circle her with my flowered and unflowered years. On my knees, I would tell her my wishes and dreams, not of this world. I would run after her to ask her how to live, how to escape from myself, from the world, whom to run to, where to go” (op. cit., 1981).
Compared to Vitebsk, Paris in the early years of the 20th century was a circus-goer’s paradise, and when Chagall first arrived there in June 1911 he discovered the far more exciting and artful professionals who drew crowds at the famed Cirque Médrano on the edge of Montmartre and the Cirque d’Hiver in the 11ème arrondissement. He joined a long and distinguished line of painters working in France who featured the circus in their work, stemming from Watteau—a favorite of Chagall—and thereafter including Daumier, Degas, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec, and among his immediate contemporaries, Picasso, Rouault, Van Dongen and Léger.
The circus subjects that Chagall developed during the 1920s and 1930s continued to bear fruit for the next half century of his astonishingly long career. Notwithstanding the irrepressible high spirits that everywhere burst forth in Le petit cirque bleu, Chagall inwardly perceived a more serious, “blue” intimation in this spectacle, in thoughts that pervade his homage to the circus:
“For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound... These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have themselves at home in my visions... It is a magic word, circus, a timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of a great art...” (ibid.).