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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
It rings in me–
The distant city.
The white churches,
The synagogues. The door
Is open. The sky blooms.
Life flies on and on.
Marc Chagall, My Distant Home (Autobiographical Poem), March-June 1937 (B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall and His Times, Stanford, 2004, p. 460)
Le souvenir bleu is a mirage of magical lyricism and romance. Emerging from a misty blue haze, a bride and groom float in an embrace, other figures fly or hover, holding flowers or violins. A bright yellow moon hangs low on the horizon, above it a dove, or an angel perhaps. A red firework bursts in the left sky, reflected on the river beneath some small figures in a row boat. The city on the river bank could be Paris, but knowing Chagall, with some elements borrowed from his memories of Russia. The river and its bridge are painted in a myriad of blues with a little boat at the centre and another suggested in the foreground by a mere outline, creating a Monet-like impression of ethereal fog over the moving current. Encompassing Chagall’s distinctive themes of love, music and fantasy, the present painting epitomizes the artist’s deeply personal artistic vision.
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds, people caught up in the early excitement of love, who have abandoned themselves to love, and have completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella, who were married in 1915 and lived together for almost three decades, this experience of love took a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade.
Chagall's adoration for Bella grew even greater following her passing, and he continued to celebrate her impact on his life in many paintings. He married again in 1952, this time to Valentine ("Vava") Brodsky, after a courtship that lasted only a few months. The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, could never upstage the power of the mythic eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella, or diminish those feelings now permanently fixed within the artist's mind, the central vault in the great storehouse of his boundless imagination. In the present painting, executed more than a quarter-century after Bella's death, Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, are betrothed again, floating in a heavenly blue sky. As Sidney Alexander has written:
Chagall and Bella remained lovers, though married; monogamous but not monotonous; lovers to the end, in a story so felicitous as to offer little drama to the biographer or novelist. Out of this domestic Eden, lived and remembered, poured an endless series of painted epithalamia: Bella as goddess, Bella as Venus, Bella as Bathsheba; Bella as the Shulamite of the Song of Songs; Bella as bride in her sperm-spurting gown, a sex comet; Bella as a white whish of rocket soaring toward the moon Even after her death (when he was living with Virginia) whenever he painted a bride it was Bella; whenever he painted a bridal veil it referred to Bella (in Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).
It rings in me–
The distant city.
The white churches,
The synagogues. The door
Is open. The sky blooms.
Life flies on and on.
Marc Chagall, My Distant Home (Autobiographical Poem), March-June 1937 (B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall and His Times, Stanford, 2004, p. 460)
Le souvenir bleu is a mirage of magical lyricism and romance. Emerging from a misty blue haze, a bride and groom float in an embrace, other figures fly or hover, holding flowers or violins. A bright yellow moon hangs low on the horizon, above it a dove, or an angel perhaps. A red firework bursts in the left sky, reflected on the river beneath some small figures in a row boat. The city on the river bank could be Paris, but knowing Chagall, with some elements borrowed from his memories of Russia. The river and its bridge are painted in a myriad of blues with a little boat at the centre and another suggested in the foreground by a mere outline, creating a Monet-like impression of ethereal fog over the moving current. Encompassing Chagall’s distinctive themes of love, music and fantasy, the present painting epitomizes the artist’s deeply personal artistic vision.
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds, people caught up in the early excitement of love, who have abandoned themselves to love, and have completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella, who were married in 1915 and lived together for almost three decades, this experience of love took a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade.
Chagall's adoration for Bella grew even greater following her passing, and he continued to celebrate her impact on his life in many paintings. He married again in 1952, this time to Valentine ("Vava") Brodsky, after a courtship that lasted only a few months. The pleasant reality of daily domestic intimacy, however, could never upstage the power of the mythic eternal moment that Chagall had created around the memory of Bella, or diminish those feelings now permanently fixed within the artist's mind, the central vault in the great storehouse of his boundless imagination. In the present painting, executed more than a quarter-century after Bella's death, Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, are betrothed again, floating in a heavenly blue sky. As Sidney Alexander has written:
Chagall and Bella remained lovers, though married; monogamous but not monotonous; lovers to the end, in a story so felicitous as to offer little drama to the biographer or novelist. Out of this domestic Eden, lived and remembered, poured an endless series of painted epithalamia: Bella as goddess, Bella as Venus, Bella as Bathsheba; Bella as the Shulamite of the Song of Songs; Bella as bride in her sperm-spurting gown, a sex comet; Bella as a white whish of rocket soaring toward the moon Even after her death (when he was living with Virginia) whenever he painted a bride it was Bella; whenever he painted a bridal veil it referred to Bella (in Marc Chagall, A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 82).