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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Chagall never forgot an incident going back to his years as a young man in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, when he looked on while 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. The passing public deemed their efforts more pathetic than applaudable, and Chagall sadly watched as they walked away, unappreciated and empty-handed. Then, and at certain other times during his career, 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. P. Southgate, reproduced in Marc Chagall: Le Cirque, Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1981, n.p.).
If, on the other hand, he were as an artist talented and fortunate enough, there might be an altogether more favorable outcome in store for him. Chagall summoned the experience of circus performance—clowns, acrobats and young ladies riding bareback on horses, the ringside stands brimming with spectators, the total spectacle of the circus, in all its colorful variety—as a vivid metaphor for the life he decided to lead. The vision and dream of the circus came to lie at the very heart of his personal mythology.
Compared to Vitebsk, Paris in the early years of the 20th century was a circus-goer's paradise, and when Chagall 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. Chagall painted a notable picture of a female acrobat before returning to his homeland via Berlin in mid-1914. He thereby joined a long and distinguished line of painters working in France who featured the circus in their work, a line stemming from Jean-Antoine Watteau—a favorite of Chagall—and thereafter including Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and among his immediate contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Kees van Dongen and Fernand Léger.
Ambroise Vollard, Chagall's dealer and the publisher of his prints during the 1920s and 1930s, was a great aficionado of the circus. Following the series of Gogol Dead Souls etchings that the artist completed for him in 1925, Vollard asked Chagall to provide gouaches illustrating the Fables of La Fontaine. Chagall went on to produce one hundred sheets in all. In 1927, as Chagall was finishing this project, Vollard proposed yet another, this time a suite of gouaches based on the theme of the circus.
The Fables gouaches had earned Chagall more than 190,000 francs; Vollard soon sold them to Galerie Bernheim-Jeune for more than twice that amount. Not that Chagall needed any further incentive, but Vollard moreover offered him free use of his season box at the Cirque d'Hiver, of which the artist happily availed himself, "because the circus was a lovely place to take his daughter," Sidney Alexander has written. "Marc was as childishly delighted with it as Ida" (Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 292).
Chagall painted his circus series in two sets, nineteen gouaches in all, which became known as the Cirque Vollard (Meyer, nos. 481-501). The artist based many of these works on sketches he drew while enjoying the spectacle of the Cirque d'Hiver. The sheer exhilaration of these pictures, their unalloyed joy and life-affirming spirit, contrasts sharply with the somber clowns and circus queens of Rouault, another artist who produced illustrations on the circus theme for Vollard.
The circus subjects that Chagall developed in 1926-1930 would continue to bear fruit for the next half century of this artist's amazingly long life. Notwithstanding the irrepressible high spirits that may always be savored in Chagall's treatment of this genre, the artist inwardly perceived a more serious side to this spectacle, a significant aspect of the circus dream that is equally present here if not so plainly expressed in paint, which may be best gleaned from thoughts that pervade the text Chagall wrote in his 1967 homage to the circus (Le Cirque, trans. P. Southgate, op. cit.):
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 a home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colors and make-up, I can dream of painting new psychic distortions.
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.
The present work is related to Chagall’s Le cirque bleu oil paintings (figs. 1-2), which are housed in the collections of Tate Modern, London and the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Chagall never forgot an incident going back to his years as a young man in the Belorussian town of Vitebsk, when he looked on while 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. The passing public deemed their efforts more pathetic than applaudable, and Chagall sadly watched as they walked away, unappreciated and empty-handed. Then, and at certain other times during his career, 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. P. Southgate, reproduced in Marc Chagall: Le Cirque, Paintings 1969-1980, exh. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1981, n.p.).
If, on the other hand, he were as an artist talented and fortunate enough, there might be an altogether more favorable outcome in store for him. Chagall summoned the experience of circus performance—clowns, acrobats and young ladies riding bareback on horses, the ringside stands brimming with spectators, the total spectacle of the circus, in all its colorful variety—as a vivid metaphor for the life he decided to lead. The vision and dream of the circus came to lie at the very heart of his personal mythology.
Compared to Vitebsk, Paris in the early years of the 20th century was a circus-goer's paradise, and when Chagall 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. Chagall painted a notable picture of a female acrobat before returning to his homeland via Berlin in mid-1914. He thereby joined a long and distinguished line of painters working in France who featured the circus in their work, a line stemming from Jean-Antoine Watteau—a favorite of Chagall—and thereafter including Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and among his immediate contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Georges Rouault, Kees van Dongen and Fernand Léger.
Ambroise Vollard, Chagall's dealer and the publisher of his prints during the 1920s and 1930s, was a great aficionado of the circus. Following the series of Gogol Dead Souls etchings that the artist completed for him in 1925, Vollard asked Chagall to provide gouaches illustrating the Fables of La Fontaine. Chagall went on to produce one hundred sheets in all. In 1927, as Chagall was finishing this project, Vollard proposed yet another, this time a suite of gouaches based on the theme of the circus.
The Fables gouaches had earned Chagall more than 190,000 francs; Vollard soon sold them to Galerie Bernheim-Jeune for more than twice that amount. Not that Chagall needed any further incentive, but Vollard moreover offered him free use of his season box at the Cirque d'Hiver, of which the artist happily availed himself, "because the circus was a lovely place to take his daughter," Sidney Alexander has written. "Marc was as childishly delighted with it as Ida" (Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 292).
Chagall painted his circus series in two sets, nineteen gouaches in all, which became known as the Cirque Vollard (Meyer, nos. 481-501). The artist based many of these works on sketches he drew while enjoying the spectacle of the Cirque d'Hiver. The sheer exhilaration of these pictures, their unalloyed joy and life-affirming spirit, contrasts sharply with the somber clowns and circus queens of Rouault, another artist who produced illustrations on the circus theme for Vollard.
The circus subjects that Chagall developed in 1926-1930 would continue to bear fruit for the next half century of this artist's amazingly long life. Notwithstanding the irrepressible high spirits that may always be savored in Chagall's treatment of this genre, the artist inwardly perceived a more serious side to this spectacle, a significant aspect of the circus dream that is equally present here if not so plainly expressed in paint, which may be best gleaned from thoughts that pervade the text Chagall wrote in his 1967 homage to the circus (Le Cirque, trans. P. Southgate, op. cit.):
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 a home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colors and make-up, I can dream of painting new psychic distortions.
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.
The present work is related to Chagall’s Le cirque bleu oil paintings (figs. 1-2), which are housed in the collections of Tate Modern, London and the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.