L'esprit des roses (Au-dessus des fleurs)

L’esprit des roses (Au-dessus des fleur) is being sold to benefit the new Museu Vila de Vassouras, which will open in 2023 after four years of restoration and reconstruction of the old Hospital da Santa Casa de Vassouras. Located 120 km from Rio de Janeiro, the region of Vale do Café was the most important coffee producing area in the world during the 19th century, responsible for 75% of all coffee consumed globally. Its towns, squares, churches, and more than 500 farms were built by native Indians, Brazilians and foreign settlers, and above all by enslaved immigrants from Africa who, in 1850, represented 70% of the entire population. Each of these communities brought their own cultures, beliefs, and ways of life to the area, resulting in a richly eclectic society. Boasting over 2,000 square metres of exhibition space, this new museum, the personal vision of renowned collector Ronaldo Cezar Coelho, will focus on the memory, research and community education of the multicultural heritage of Vale do Café and of the Brazilian nation. A lesser-known aspect of the history of the Hospital da Santa Casa de Vassouras is a Jewish memorial in the gardens, where Benjamin Benathar, a Jewish immigrant from Morocco, was buried in 1859. The museum’s ownership and operation will be sponsored by an endowment, in part funded by the sale at Christie’s of L’esprit des roses (Au-dessus des fleurs) and other works from the collection of Ronaldo Cezar Coelho.

Painted in 1926, Marc Chagall’s L’esprit des roses (Au-dessus des fleurs) illustrates the important shift that occurred in the artist’s work during the late 1920s, inspired by the joy and contentment he found in his new life in France. Having spent years leading a nomadic existence, which had seen the artist and his wife move more than a dozen times through three countries since the start of their marriage, Chagall and his family were finally able to settle in an apartment on the avenue d’Orléans in the 14th arrondissement of Paris in 1923. Their days living in run-down communal flats and tiny damp rooms were finally at an end, and the French capital soon became a safe haven for the family, offering them a home and a sense of comfort after years of struggle. 

Paris was just beginning to regain its vibrant, pre-war energy, and Chagall soon fell in with a cosmopolitan, avant-garde group of friends, which included the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, the critic Florent Fels, and the poets Ivan and Claire Goll. As he immersed himself in French life once again, the artist began to adopt a softer approach to painting, eschewing the sharp angles and discordant colours of his Russian years, in favour of a more romantic, diffused play of light and colour.

Whereas during his first trip to France, Chagall had focused principally on the city, rarely venturing outside the limits of Paris, he now took every opportunity to travel around the country, keen to immerse himself in nature and the artistic heritage of the French landscape. ‘I want an art of the earth and not merely an art of the head,’ he explained to Fels, when questioned on this new direction on his art (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, London, 1964, p. 337). Together, Chagall and his family frequently travelled to the Île-de-France, the land immortalised in the art of Monet and Pissarro, Cézanne and Sisley. Relishing the natural beauty of the area and the simplicity of life in the countryside, the Chagalls rented rooms in the small hamlet of Montchauvet in the hilly farmland between the Seine and Oise rivers, spending time in the company of the Delaunays and Fels. Chagall’s creativity blossomed in these surroundings, the idyllic landscapes and rich fecundity of the countryside inspiring him to pursue an array of new motifs that would fuel his art for years to come.

During the summer of 1925, Chagall was slowly bringing to completion his series of etchings based on Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls for the dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard. The rural motifs that filled the paintings that the artist made on his journeys through the French countryside during that summer gave Vollard the idea for the next series of illustrations he would commission from Chagall: La Fontaine’s Fables. Having fallen in love with the attractions of the French countryside, Chagall decided that he would undertake these gouaches while working in the same kind of rural environment that had inspired La Fontaine three centuries earlier. He travelled south with Bella in the spring of 1926, stopping first at Mourillon, a small fishing village on the Mediterranean, which is now incorporated within the sprawling port of Toulon. They remained there until the summer, staying with Georges and Marguerite Duthuit-Matisse in a small pension overlooking the sea, known as La Reserve.

This journey proved revelatory for Chagall. This was his first encounter with the Mediterranean coast of France, and like countless painters before him, the artist was immediately struck by the brilliant light, the bold colours, and the profuse array of semi-tropical flora that grew in great abundance in this sun-soaked 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, New York, 1995, p. 172). Indeed, it was during this sojourn that one of the most important motifs of Chagall’s career was to emerge – the large, effusive bouquets of freshly-cut flowers and foliage, at the very height of their fleeting beauty, which would dominate his canvases for years to come. 

Inspired by the fresh blooms Bella purchased on her daily trips to the local market, these compositions focus on lavish bunches of campanulas, peonies, roses and arum lilies that brought their rented rooms to life with their heady scent and lively colours. Typically painted in a heavy impasto, each petal captured in thick, energetic strokes of pigment, Chagall found in these bouquets a way to marry his search for a poetic, dreamlike language of painting with his desire to root his compositions in the unique atmosphere of the idyllic French countryside.

Described by the artist as ‘exercises in the equation of colour and light,’ these dramatic bouquets became a hallmark of Chagall’s oeuvre. It was the sheer beauty of these flowers, filled with such colour and life, that struck contemporary commentators, leading E. Tériade to exclaim: ‘To see the world through bouquets! Huge, monstrous bouquets in ringing profusion, haunting brilliance. Were we to see him only through these abundances gathered at random from gardens, harmonized who knows how, and naturally balanced, we could wish for no more precious joy! These are well-bred flowers, who have discovered connections and made slow and daring friendships… Chagall places in front of himself a heavy bouquet, nourished by clear saps and he captures its abundance. He allows himself to be invaded. In its near and constant presence, he eventually dozes. He dreams’ (E. ‘Chagall and Romantic Painting,’ 1926, reproduced in ibid., p. 136).

In L’esprit des roses (Au-dessus des fleurs), Chagall enlarges the bouquet to enormous proportions, allowing it to fill the canvas with its vibrant play of pigment and thick, gestural brushstrokes that stand in stark contrast to the delicately applied notes of colour in the rest of the composition. Indeed, everything else in the scene is captured in a dream-like haze, appearing like a mirage that may dissolve and disappear at any moment, leaving the bouquet floating in mid-air – the view from the artist’s rented rooms at La Reserve is delicately sketched in simple lines and clouds of soft pigment, capturing the luminous blue of the sea and the sun as it reflects off the water, the rolling curves of the headland in the distance, and two small boats just visible on the horizon line, puffing along to an unknown destination.

Blurring the boundaries between interior and exterior space by allowing the balcony to dissolve away, its form merely suggested by the lone, curvaceous baluster to the left of the flowers, Chagall captures a sense of his own personal experience before this magical landscape, as the architecture surrounding him falls away and he loses himself in the beauty of the view. The dream-like atmosphere of the composition is amplified even further by the presence of a figure flying through the sky above the bouquet, their joyful expression and unbridled sense of freedom lending the scene a whimsical sense of joie de vivre. With features reminiscent of the Chagall’s own appearance, this floating figure may be read as a self-portrait of the artist, captured in a joyful reverie. In this way, L’esprit des roses (Au-dessus des fleurs) immerses the viewer in the serene, blissful world of colour, light and romanticism that Chagall had found in the South of France during these years, a time he would later describe as the happiest of his life.