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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
Chagall first painted an extended series of floral still-lifes during his travels around central and southern France, in the Midi, the Auvergne and Savoy, during the late 1920s. It was in this way, by studying and painting the resident flora of the local countryside, that the artist most intimately acquainted himself with the beauty and charm of la belle France. He discovered, as had Henri Fantin-Latour, Odilon Redon and Pierre-Auguste Renoir before him, that flowers are the living organisms in which color manifests its properties with the most appealing purity, subtlety and brilliance, inspiring the most delicate impressions and harmonies of which painting is capable. "The flower pieces of that period," Franz Meyer wrote, "as Chagall said later, were des exercices dans la couleur-lumière... 'exercises in the equation of color and light'" (Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 369).
Flowers were an integral part of Chagall's life-affirming vision of the world, in which these colorful splendors of nature actually seem larger, more brilliant and even more vital than in real life. Such paintings happily soar far beyond the confines laid down in the literal translation of the traditional French genre of the nature morte. Each Chagall painting of this kind projects the newness, the effervescent freshness and pure excitement of spontaneous discovery.
"Marc Chagall loved flowers," wrote André Verdet. "He delighted in their aroma, in contemplating their colors... Usually they created a sense of joy, but they also reflect the melancholy of memories, the sadness of separations, of solitude, if not suffering and tragedy... I remember a visit to La Colline [Chagall's home in Vence] some time ago. He had taken a painting from his studio and placed it against a tree trunk next to plants and flowers. He said, 'If my painting holds up in nature, if it doesn't disturb the harmony, then it is real, and perhaps one day I could put my name to it'" (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 347).
Chagall first painted an extended series of floral still-lifes during his travels around central and southern France, in the Midi, the Auvergne and Savoy, during the late 1920s. It was in this way, by studying and painting the resident flora of the local countryside, that the artist most intimately acquainted himself with the beauty and charm of la belle France. He discovered, as had Henri Fantin-Latour, Odilon Redon and Pierre-Auguste Renoir before him, that flowers are the living organisms in which color manifests its properties with the most appealing purity, subtlety and brilliance, inspiring the most delicate impressions and harmonies of which painting is capable. "The flower pieces of that period," Franz Meyer wrote, "as Chagall said later, were des exercices dans la couleur-lumière... 'exercises in the equation of color and light'" (Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 369).
Flowers were an integral part of Chagall's life-affirming vision of the world, in which these colorful splendors of nature actually seem larger, more brilliant and even more vital than in real life. Such paintings happily soar far beyond the confines laid down in the literal translation of the traditional French genre of the nature morte. Each Chagall painting of this kind projects the newness, the effervescent freshness and pure excitement of spontaneous discovery.
"Marc Chagall loved flowers," wrote André Verdet. "He delighted in their aroma, in contemplating their colors... Usually they created a sense of joy, but they also reflect the melancholy of memories, the sadness of separations, of solitude, if not suffering and tragedy... I remember a visit to La Colline [Chagall's home in Vence] some time ago. He had taken a painting from his studio and placed it against a tree trunk next to plants and flowers. He said, 'If my painting holds up in nature, if it doesn't disturb the harmony, then it is real, and perhaps one day I could put my name to it'" (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 347).