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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Chagall’s Nu sous la table, painted in 1927-1928, is a mirage of magical lyricism and romance. Emerging from a misty blue haze, a reclining nude holding a violin lies beneath a table topped with a magnificent arrangement of brightly hued flowers. In the middle distance a rowing boat with two figures floats near a shoreline, while on the right of the composition an angel looks on. Encompassing Chagall’s distinctive themes of love, music and fantasy, the present painting epitomizes the artist’s deeply personal artistic vision.
Chagall painted Nu sous la table during a period of unequaled contentment in his long life. In September 1923, nearly a decade after the outbreak of war had interrupted his youthful first stay in Paris, Chagall left Russia with his wife Bella and their daughter Ida and returned to the French capital, which bubbled with life in this peaceful decade preceding the Depression. Quickly falling in with a cosmopolitan, erudite circle of companions—the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the publisher Florent Fels, and the poets Ivan and Claire Goll and Joseph Delteil, to name a few—Chagall participated avidly in the social and cultural milieu of the city. At the end of 1926, he signed a contract with the prestigious gallery Bernheim-Jeune, which provided him with financial security for the very first time; and in 1927, the prominent art critic Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern French Painters, affirming his leadership role within the École de Paris.
During his first stay in France in 1910-1914, Chagall had rarely ventured beyond Paris; now, he took every opportunity to travel into the provinces, immersing himself in the gentle light and varied terrain of la douce France. “I want an art of the earth and not merely an art of the head,” he explained to Florent Fels (quoted in F. Meyer, op. cit., 1964, p. 337). In Normandy and Brittany, in the Auvergne and the Savoy, Bella brought bunches of flowers home from market each day for Chagall to paint, their vibrant colors serving the artist as a link with the surrounding countryside. “It was in French landscapes, paintings of flowers, and a few portraits that his art advanced in these years,” Jackie Wullschlager has written. “All speak of a new harmony with and interest in nature. Whereas in the first Paris period, his art had been metaphysical and passionate, the yearning expression of visionary youth, in this second French phase Chagall opened out to the world and the French countryside. He found the courage to express himself in a new idiom; away from ravaged Russia and its insistence on ideological positions, he was able to concentrate on painterly values” (Chagall: A Biography, New York, 2008, p. 321).
In Nu sous la table, the various compositional elements occupy an abstract and elusive space, imbuing the canvas with a sense of poetic enchantment. “The atmosphere encompasses and pervades the flowers like a magically light, airy fluid, vibrant with their vitality,” Franz Meyer has written. “The flower pieces of this period, as Chagall said later, were des exercices dans la couleur-lumière, which might be translated ‘exercises in the equation of color and light.’ Yet at the same time the material quality of the heavy roses, like that of the scintillating still-lifes of fruits, is accentuated” (op. cit., p. 369).
Chagall’s Nu sous la table, painted in 1927-1928, is a mirage of magical lyricism and romance. Emerging from a misty blue haze, a reclining nude holding a violin lies beneath a table topped with a magnificent arrangement of brightly hued flowers. In the middle distance a rowing boat with two figures floats near a shoreline, while on the right of the composition an angel looks on. Encompassing Chagall’s distinctive themes of love, music and fantasy, the present painting epitomizes the artist’s deeply personal artistic vision.
Chagall painted Nu sous la table during a period of unequaled contentment in his long life. In September 1923, nearly a decade after the outbreak of war had interrupted his youthful first stay in Paris, Chagall left Russia with his wife Bella and their daughter Ida and returned to the French capital, which bubbled with life in this peaceful decade preceding the Depression. Quickly falling in with a cosmopolitan, erudite circle of companions—the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the publisher Florent Fels, and the poets Ivan and Claire Goll and Joseph Delteil, to name a few—Chagall participated avidly in the social and cultural milieu of the city. At the end of 1926, he signed a contract with the prestigious gallery Bernheim-Jeune, which provided him with financial security for the very first time; and in 1927, the prominent art critic Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern French Painters, affirming his leadership role within the École de Paris.
During his first stay in France in 1910-1914, Chagall had rarely ventured beyond Paris; now, he took every opportunity to travel into the provinces, immersing himself in the gentle light and varied terrain of la douce France. “I want an art of the earth and not merely an art of the head,” he explained to Florent Fels (quoted in F. Meyer, op. cit., 1964, p. 337). In Normandy and Brittany, in the Auvergne and the Savoy, Bella brought bunches of flowers home from market each day for Chagall to paint, their vibrant colors serving the artist as a link with the surrounding countryside. “It was in French landscapes, paintings of flowers, and a few portraits that his art advanced in these years,” Jackie Wullschlager has written. “All speak of a new harmony with and interest in nature. Whereas in the first Paris period, his art had been metaphysical and passionate, the yearning expression of visionary youth, in this second French phase Chagall opened out to the world and the French countryside. He found the courage to express himself in a new idiom; away from ravaged Russia and its insistence on ideological positions, he was able to concentrate on painterly values” (Chagall: A Biography, New York, 2008, p. 321).
In Nu sous la table, the various compositional elements occupy an abstract and elusive space, imbuing the canvas with a sense of poetic enchantment. “The atmosphere encompasses and pervades the flowers like a magically light, airy fluid, vibrant with their vitality,” Franz Meyer has written. “The flower pieces of this period, as Chagall said later, were des exercices dans la couleur-lumière, which might be translated ‘exercises in the equation of color and light.’ Yet at the same time the material quality of the heavy roses, like that of the scintillating still-lifes of fruits, is accentuated” (op. cit., p. 369).