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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
In Chagall’s realm of the imagination the world is often a place turned upside down. The daytime darkness in Couple au double-profil, occasioned by the rare event of a solar eclipse, is a sure sign that peculiar or bizarre phenomena are in store for all those present, as is certainly the case for this pair of young lovers. Against the backdrop of a Russian village, Chagall’s native Vitebsk, the head of a dapper young suitor appears to have merged with his fantasy of his beloved—inverted and nude—who is meanwhile standing beside him, fully clothed in finely embroidered linen. The reversal is total and complete: while her features have found their way to him, her countenance has assumed the combined appearance of two barnyard creatures—a rooster and goat—which Chagall often assigned in pictures to his own male surrogate as emblematic of lusty, libidinous impulses. Now more aware of his thoughts, she shares herself with him, comprising the “better half” of his unformed, impressionable character. Love and Art have triumphed—while a fiddler and clarinetist regale the couple with music, the newly sensitized fellow lends his attention to a poet standing beside him, reciting his verses.
The artist’s large and growing public during his late years was readily responsive to the fantasy, romance, and sheer joie de vivre in his consistently lyrical, wholly communicative pictorial idiom—a folkloric surrealism—as well as his tender sense of melancholy, the bittersweet fruit of a deepening dimension of life-affirming insight and wisdom. “As a rule, the artist cannot see himself,” Chagall told Pierre Schneider in 1979. “Perhaps age gives one the possibility to do so. With age you see your own life” (quoted in Chagall, ext. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1979, n.p.).
Chagall conceived much of his late work as a return to his beginnings—the spark of first love, the reclamation of a child-like excitement with which to greet life’s simplest pleasures, while paying heed to the passing sadness of transience and loss. “In your pictures,” Schneider remarked, “the painter is always represented as being young.” “If it weren’t so,” Chagall replied, “it would be useless to work” (ibid.).
In Chagall’s realm of the imagination the world is often a place turned upside down. The daytime darkness in Couple au double-profil, occasioned by the rare event of a solar eclipse, is a sure sign that peculiar or bizarre phenomena are in store for all those present, as is certainly the case for this pair of young lovers. Against the backdrop of a Russian village, Chagall’s native Vitebsk, the head of a dapper young suitor appears to have merged with his fantasy of his beloved—inverted and nude—who is meanwhile standing beside him, fully clothed in finely embroidered linen. The reversal is total and complete: while her features have found their way to him, her countenance has assumed the combined appearance of two barnyard creatures—a rooster and goat—which Chagall often assigned in pictures to his own male surrogate as emblematic of lusty, libidinous impulses. Now more aware of his thoughts, she shares herself with him, comprising the “better half” of his unformed, impressionable character. Love and Art have triumphed—while a fiddler and clarinetist regale the couple with music, the newly sensitized fellow lends his attention to a poet standing beside him, reciting his verses.
The artist’s large and growing public during his late years was readily responsive to the fantasy, romance, and sheer joie de vivre in his consistently lyrical, wholly communicative pictorial idiom—a folkloric surrealism—as well as his tender sense of melancholy, the bittersweet fruit of a deepening dimension of life-affirming insight and wisdom. “As a rule, the artist cannot see himself,” Chagall told Pierre Schneider in 1979. “Perhaps age gives one the possibility to do so. With age you see your own life” (quoted in Chagall, ext. cat., Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1979, n.p.).
Chagall conceived much of his late work as a return to his beginnings—the spark of first love, the reclamation of a child-like excitement with which to greet life’s simplest pleasures, while paying heed to the passing sadness of transience and loss. “In your pictures,” Schneider remarked, “the painter is always represented as being young.” “If it weren’t so,” Chagall replied, “it would be useless to work” (ibid.).