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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Chagall cherished France, his adopted home, for the phenomenon he called lumière-liberté. Everywhere in Paris and the countryside, he perceived, “hovered that astonishing light of freedom which I had seen nowhere else. And this light, reborn as art, passed easily into the canvasses of the great French masters” (in B. Harshaw, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 88). When he returned to France in 1923 from the dire, dangerous conditions he and his family had endured in revolutionary Russia, he celebrated lumière-liberté as a joyous renewal of creative possibilities—a paradise regained—in a series of sumptuous floral paintings, a subject to which he was continually drawn for the rest of his life.
“Marc Chagall loved flowers,” André Verdet wrote in 1985. “He delighted in their aroma, in contemplating their colors. For a long time, certainly after he moved for good to the South of France, there were always flowers in his studio. In his work bouquets of flowers held a special place...Usually they created a sense of joy, but they could also reflect the melancholy of memories, the sadness of separations, of solitude, if not suffering and tragedy” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 347).
Chagall cherished France, his adopted home, for the phenomenon he called lumière-liberté. Everywhere in Paris and the countryside, he perceived, “hovered that astonishing light of freedom which I had seen nowhere else. And this light, reborn as art, passed easily into the canvasses of the great French masters” (in B. Harshaw, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 88). When he returned to France in 1923 from the dire, dangerous conditions he and his family had endured in revolutionary Russia, he celebrated lumière-liberté as a joyous renewal of creative possibilities—a paradise regained—in a series of sumptuous floral paintings, a subject to which he was continually drawn for the rest of his life.
“Marc Chagall loved flowers,” André Verdet wrote in 1985. “He delighted in their aroma, in contemplating their colors. For a long time, certainly after he moved for good to the South of France, there were always flowers in his studio. In his work bouquets of flowers held a special place...Usually they created a sense of joy, but they could also reflect the melancholy of memories, the sadness of separations, of solitude, if not suffering and tragedy” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 347).