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Lot Essay
"For me, you are—my life," Chagall wrote encouragingly to his young paramour, Virginia Haggard McNeil, three days after their son David was born in 1946. "I can't live anymore without you. Fate wanted me to meet you after dear Bella (whom you love too)" (quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall and His Times, A Documentary Narrative, Stanford, 2004, p. 588). Writing from Paris, Chagall had timed his first return to Europe after the war purposefully to be absent at the birth of his son, the undeniable proof of a relationship he was not yet prepared to admit. Virginia, the Paris-born cosmopolitan daughter of a British diplomat, had entered his life in 1945 as his housekeeper, rebellious in youth and unhappy in her marriage. Each of them had felt "starved," as Virginia later recalled, but they found new love together, unexpectedly for Chagall only nine months after the death of his beloved wife, Bella (quoted in ibid., p. 565). 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, nor diminish the intensity of imagery for which she remained the principal source.
Both women appear to grace Village natal: the angelic Bella hovers over the body of Virginia, who holds a child in her arms. As years passed following Bella’s death, her specter made only occasional, ectoplasmic appearances in Chagall’s paintings, almost always in bridal veil. Chagall's brides were, according to Virginia, "always Bella," but the Madonna and Child images were generally Virginia and David, his son (ibid., p. 386).
Village natal was part of an extensive collection of nearly 100 works formed throughout the 1950s and 60s. The collection contained works by the towering figures of 20th century art such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst, among others. Often acquired either directly from the artists with whom the collector, a German emigre to the US in the 1920, shared personal friendships, or through their primary dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Aimé Maeght, historic figures in their own right
Both women appear to grace Village natal: the angelic Bella hovers over the body of Virginia, who holds a child in her arms. As years passed following Bella’s death, her specter made only occasional, ectoplasmic appearances in Chagall’s paintings, almost always in bridal veil. Chagall's brides were, according to Virginia, "always Bella," but the Madonna and Child images were generally Virginia and David, his son (ibid., p. 386).
Village natal was part of an extensive collection of nearly 100 works formed throughout the 1950s and 60s. The collection contained works by the towering figures of 20th century art such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst, among others. Often acquired either directly from the artists with whom the collector, a German emigre to the US in the 1920, shared personal friendships, or through their primary dealers such as Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Aimé Maeght, historic figures in their own right