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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Painted in 1981, Peintre à la scène biblique comes from a period of stability and contentment in Marc Chagall’s life. Having settled in Vence in the South of France, the artist and his second wife, Valentina Brodsky, affectionately known to him as Vava, were living in a house called ‘Les Collines’. Painted towards the end of the artist’s life, Peintre à la scène biblique can be seen as an amalgamation and presentation of some of the leading themes that Chagall had examined throughout his career; love, religion, memory and fantasy, as well as presenting many of the artist’s most evocative and emblematic motifs.
Throughout the duration of his lifelong artistic practice, Chagall would often return to earlier works, to revisit them with hindsight and experience, and through the lens of current events. In Peintre à la scène biblique, painted in the wake of the political upheaval of the early 1970s, Chagall has revisited one of his most important large scale and political works of the 1930s – La Révolution (Fig. 1) and also the triptych Revolution, Resurrection, Liberation of 1937-1952 (fig. 2), now housed in the Musée Chagall, Nice. The tripartite compositional structure shared by these works, as well as their ensuing meta-narrative, can be seen to derive from the same source in Chagall’s consciousness.
Chagall would work on the monumental composition La Révolution from 1937 until the early 1940s. In La Révolution Chagall drew upon memories of his early life, set against the context of the highly charged political climate of France, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Artists and intellectuals were being brought into these ‘revolutionary’ times, but Chagall felt they were all losing sight of the true context and meaning of the events of 1917. Meyer suggests that ‘Chagall still felt that the Russian revolution of 1917 was ‘his’ revolution, which had unfortunately been robbed of its meaning by the course of events. So he wanted to show all the Parisian intellectuals… who talked of revolution in the thirties, the real significance of the term as a total human-artistic-political fact.’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall Life and Work, New York, 1965, p. 413).
Chagall’s painting of 1937, and related studies, one of which is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, show to the left of the composition the crowds of the Russian Revolution, pressing forwards against barricades, with flags and rifles waving. To the right is a more pleasant and idyllic village scene, with an artist painting at his easel, surrounded by musicians and animals and a young couple. In the centre of La Révolution is the figure of Lenin, balancing on one arm on a table, like an acrobat. Depicting the complexity of the time through the lens of his own personal experience, in recent history, La Révolution can be seen as the artist’s grand political statement.
Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation was created in 1937-1952 when Chagall lived in exile in France and the United States of America. It has been interpreted by Ellen G. Landau as “signalling, in large part, the painter’s own optimistic post-war rebirth”. Here, we see similar themes in an altarpiece figuration, showing the progression of the social, religious and political motifs towards the artist’s vision of their glorious culmination in the golden Liberation. The Bible had served as artistic inspiration for Chagall throughout his life, particularly during the Second World War when he painted a number of scenes of the crucifixion, which were at times met with controversy due to the perceived merging of Christian and Jewish religions.
Peintre à la scène biblique shares many common themes with this extraordinary triptych, featuring the three stages set together in one vertical composition, this time introducing new elements of his recent personal narrative to the right. Even though the artist spent many years away from his Russian place of origin, his national heritage and identity remained a potent force within his painting. Chagall once stated that, 'If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing' (Chagall, quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, Exh. cat., New York, 1995, p. 16). A street scene from Chagall’s beloved Vitebsk, the Russian town in which he was born, provides the setting over which a heavenly sky full of floating figures and animals are depicted, referencing the same themes of La Liberation.
The present work is bathed in varying, dappled, tones of Chagall’s characteristic blue, imbuing the work with a fantastical atmosphere and figments of the distinctive visionary imagination of the artist. The artist depicts himself with his palette in hand, with Vava behind his head in a red dress, a large bouquet above her signifying Chagall’s newfound love and peace with her companionship in Vence, amongst the trials of the past and present. With a poetic lyricism that unites the varied characters and motifs, Peintre à la scène biblique is a magical impression of the artist’s wondrous pictorial world that displays an enthralling and vivid depiction of the artist’s imagination and memory.
Painted in 1981, Peintre à la scène biblique comes from a period of stability and contentment in Marc Chagall’s life. Having settled in Vence in the South of France, the artist and his second wife, Valentina Brodsky, affectionately known to him as Vava, were living in a house called ‘Les Collines’. Painted towards the end of the artist’s life, Peintre à la scène biblique can be seen as an amalgamation and presentation of some of the leading themes that Chagall had examined throughout his career; love, religion, memory and fantasy, as well as presenting many of the artist’s most evocative and emblematic motifs.
Throughout the duration of his lifelong artistic practice, Chagall would often return to earlier works, to revisit them with hindsight and experience, and through the lens of current events. In Peintre à la scène biblique, painted in the wake of the political upheaval of the early 1970s, Chagall has revisited one of his most important large scale and political works of the 1930s – La Révolution (Fig. 1) and also the triptych Revolution, Resurrection, Liberation of 1937-1952 (fig. 2), now housed in the Musée Chagall, Nice. The tripartite compositional structure shared by these works, as well as their ensuing meta-narrative, can be seen to derive from the same source in Chagall’s consciousness.
Chagall would work on the monumental composition La Révolution from 1937 until the early 1940s. In La Révolution Chagall drew upon memories of his early life, set against the context of the highly charged political climate of France, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Artists and intellectuals were being brought into these ‘revolutionary’ times, but Chagall felt they were all losing sight of the true context and meaning of the events of 1917. Meyer suggests that ‘Chagall still felt that the Russian revolution of 1917 was ‘his’ revolution, which had unfortunately been robbed of its meaning by the course of events. So he wanted to show all the Parisian intellectuals… who talked of revolution in the thirties, the real significance of the term as a total human-artistic-political fact.’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall Life and Work, New York, 1965, p. 413).
Chagall’s painting of 1937, and related studies, one of which is in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, show to the left of the composition the crowds of the Russian Revolution, pressing forwards against barricades, with flags and rifles waving. To the right is a more pleasant and idyllic village scene, with an artist painting at his easel, surrounded by musicians and animals and a young couple. In the centre of La Révolution is the figure of Lenin, balancing on one arm on a table, like an acrobat. Depicting the complexity of the time through the lens of his own personal experience, in recent history, La Révolution can be seen as the artist’s grand political statement.
Resistance, Resurrection, Liberation was created in 1937-1952 when Chagall lived in exile in France and the United States of America. It has been interpreted by Ellen G. Landau as “signalling, in large part, the painter’s own optimistic post-war rebirth”. Here, we see similar themes in an altarpiece figuration, showing the progression of the social, religious and political motifs towards the artist’s vision of their glorious culmination in the golden Liberation. The Bible had served as artistic inspiration for Chagall throughout his life, particularly during the Second World War when he painted a number of scenes of the crucifixion, which were at times met with controversy due to the perceived merging of Christian and Jewish religions.
Peintre à la scène biblique shares many common themes with this extraordinary triptych, featuring the three stages set together in one vertical composition, this time introducing new elements of his recent personal narrative to the right. Even though the artist spent many years away from his Russian place of origin, his national heritage and identity remained a potent force within his painting. Chagall once stated that, 'If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing' (Chagall, quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, Exh. cat., New York, 1995, p. 16). A street scene from Chagall’s beloved Vitebsk, the Russian town in which he was born, provides the setting over which a heavenly sky full of floating figures and animals are depicted, referencing the same themes of La Liberation.
The present work is bathed in varying, dappled, tones of Chagall’s characteristic blue, imbuing the work with a fantastical atmosphere and figments of the distinctive visionary imagination of the artist. The artist depicts himself with his palette in hand, with Vava behind his head in a red dress, a large bouquet above her signifying Chagall’s newfound love and peace with her companionship in Vence, amongst the trials of the past and present. With a poetic lyricism that unites the varied characters and motifs, Peintre à la scène biblique is a magical impression of the artist’s wondrous pictorial world that displays an enthralling and vivid depiction of the artist’s imagination and memory.