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Lot Essay
An abundantly blossoming bouquet of flowers dominates the impressively sized L’Eveil, which Marc Chagall painted in 1979. Impastoed passages of vibrant yellow, green and red tones fill the canvas, a luminous display of color and an affirmation of abundance, life, and, as the title “Awakening,” perhaps suggests, new beginnings. In the foreground, an embracing couple is airborne, floating through the ethereal blue atmosphere, while the just visible outline of the hilltop town, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Chagall’s home in the south of France, appears in the distance. A blissful sense of harmony and peace radiates from this painting, qualities that reflect Chagall’s life at the time. Living and working in Provence, accompanied by his wife, Valentina or “Vava” Brodsky, he enjoyed a life of happy contentment, describing his life as, “a bouquet of roses” (quoted in S. Alexander, Marc Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 492).
Chagall had first introduced floral still lifes in his painting in the mid-1920s. Having returned to France from his native Russia in 1923, the artist developed a new feeling for nature, and was particularly enchanted by flowers, finding them to be the embodiment of the French landscape. From this time onwards, vases or bunches of flowers took a greater prominence in Chagall’s work, often appearing as the central subject of a painting. Traveling south to the Midi and Côte d’Azur, he quickly fell under the spell of the intense light and radiant colors of the landscape. “There in the South, for the first time in my life,” he recalled, “I came into contact with a flower-filled greenery such as I had never seen in my native city” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, Southport, 1995, p. 172). It was in the south of France that Chagall first began his series of flower paintings, and upon his permanent move there in 1950, this motif came to define his late oeuvre.
Chagall once called his flower paintings, “exercises in the equation of color and light” (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1964, p. 369). L’Eveil encapsulates this description, demonstrating how Chagall distilled the bright light and color of his surroundings and conveyed them into his own, distinctive, often dreamlike pictorial form. The artist and former muse and lover of Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot, recalled that the Spanish artist had once remarked, “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is… Some of the last things he’s done in Vence convince me that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has” (quoted in F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 282).
Chagall had first introduced floral still lifes in his painting in the mid-1920s. Having returned to France from his native Russia in 1923, the artist developed a new feeling for nature, and was particularly enchanted by flowers, finding them to be the embodiment of the French landscape. From this time onwards, vases or bunches of flowers took a greater prominence in Chagall’s work, often appearing as the central subject of a painting. Traveling south to the Midi and Côte d’Azur, he quickly fell under the spell of the intense light and radiant colors of the landscape. “There in the South, for the first time in my life,” he recalled, “I came into contact with a flower-filled greenery such as I had never seen in my native city” (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, Southport, 1995, p. 172). It was in the south of France that Chagall first began his series of flower paintings, and upon his permanent move there in 1950, this motif came to define his late oeuvre.
Chagall once called his flower paintings, “exercises in the equation of color and light” (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1964, p. 369). L’Eveil encapsulates this description, demonstrating how Chagall distilled the bright light and color of his surroundings and conveyed them into his own, distinctive, often dreamlike pictorial form. The artist and former muse and lover of Pablo Picasso, Françoise Gilot, recalled that the Spanish artist had once remarked, “When Matisse dies, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is… Some of the last things he’s done in Vence convince me that there’s never been anybody since Renoir who has the feeling for light that Chagall has” (quoted in F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 282).