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Lot Essay
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds: people caught up in the early excitement of romance, who have abandoned themselves to love and completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella Rosenfeld, who were married in 1915 and lived together for almost three decades, this experience of love was a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade.
It came as a devastating blow to Chagall when Bella suffered an early death in 1944, while they were living in upstate New York during the Second World War. Chagall's adoration for Bella grew even greater following her passing, and he continued to celebrate her impact on his life and work for the rest of his life. He had an extended liaison during the late 1940s and early 1950s with Virginia Haggard McNeil, fathering a son by her, and 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 present work, painted nearly twenty years after Bella's death, depicts Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, floating over Paris's Eiffel Tower in each other's arms.
Bella shared the experience of Chagall's painting in her memoir, First Encounter, which Chagall illustrated and published in 1947, several years after her death. Bella recalled the genesis of the seminal painting L'Anniversaire, in which Chagall introduced his signature depiction of levitating figures, and she alluded to the artist's subsequent depictions of figures in full flight, a phenomenon she experienced as excitedly and magically as did her husband:
"You plunged the brushes into the paint so fast that red and blue, black and white flew through the air. They swept me with them. I suddenly felt as if I were taking off. You too were poised on one leg, as if the little room could no longer contain you. You soared up to the ceiling...Then together we floated up above the room with all its finery, and flew. Through the window a cloud and a patch of blue sky called to us. The brightly hung walls whirled around us. We flew over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, roofs, yards, churches" (quoted in First Encounter, B. Bray, trans., New York, 1983, p. 228).
The Academy Award winning, Swiss film and stage actor Maximilian Schell purchased this work directly from Chagall. In a letter by Schell of 2011, he recounts the circumstances through which he acquired the painting. "... He [Chagall] invited me to his home in Vence. I told him that I have a collection of paintings. He asked me: 'Do you have a Chagall too?' I had to say no. 'Do you want one?' he asked. I answered, 'I cannot afford it.' Then he showed me two of his paintings... He then signed it in my presence."
The central characters in many of Chagall's paintings are lovers or newlyweds: people caught up in the early excitement of romance, who have abandoned themselves to love and completely surrendered themselves unto each other. For Chagall and his first wife Bella Rosenfeld, who were married in 1915 and lived together for almost three decades, this experience of love was a shared intensity that appeared to never falter or fade.
It came as a devastating blow to Chagall when Bella suffered an early death in 1944, while they were living in upstate New York during the Second World War. Chagall's adoration for Bella grew even greater following her passing, and he continued to celebrate her impact on his life and work for the rest of his life. He had an extended liaison during the late 1940s and early 1950s with Virginia Haggard McNeil, fathering a son by her, and 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 present work, painted nearly twenty years after Bella's death, depicts Chagall and his beloved, unmarked by death or the passing of time, floating over Paris's Eiffel Tower in each other's arms.
Bella shared the experience of Chagall's painting in her memoir, First Encounter, which Chagall illustrated and published in 1947, several years after her death. Bella recalled the genesis of the seminal painting L'Anniversaire, in which Chagall introduced his signature depiction of levitating figures, and she alluded to the artist's subsequent depictions of figures in full flight, a phenomenon she experienced as excitedly and magically as did her husband:
"You plunged the brushes into the paint so fast that red and blue, black and white flew through the air. They swept me with them. I suddenly felt as if I were taking off. You too were poised on one leg, as if the little room could no longer contain you. You soared up to the ceiling...Then together we floated up above the room with all its finery, and flew. Through the window a cloud and a patch of blue sky called to us. The brightly hung walls whirled around us. We flew over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, roofs, yards, churches" (quoted in First Encounter, B. Bray, trans., New York, 1983, p. 228).
The Academy Award winning, Swiss film and stage actor Maximilian Schell purchased this work directly from Chagall. In a letter by Schell of 2011, he recounts the circumstances through which he acquired the painting. "... He [Chagall] invited me to his home in Vence. I told him that I have a collection of paintings. He asked me: 'Do you have a Chagall too?' I had to say no. 'Do you want one?' he asked. I answered, 'I cannot afford it.' Then he showed me two of his paintings... He then signed it in my presence."