Sur la table

Painted in circa 1975, Sur La Table captures the ethereal essence of Marc Chagall’s celebrated late period. Having enjoyed a long career predominantly in France, in the summer of 1973, Chagall made an emotional return to Russian soil. He was 85 years old and hadn’t seen the country of his birth for over half a century, when he left for Paris in 1922.

Invigorating the artist’s subsequent practice, this trip saw Chagall reconnect with the traditions and people that had defined his childhood, visiting his sisters Lisa and Mariaska in Leningrad, whom he had not seen since his departure in 1922. 'I feel a bit more muscular,' he announced upon his return, 'it did me good. It refreshed me for my work' (quoted in H. Kamm, ‘Emotional Return to Russia Buoys Chagall’, in The New York Times, 18 June 1973, p. 1). In the years immediately following his stay in Russia, Chagall’s art fuses past and present more imaginatively than at any other point in his career.

While many of Chagall’s late paintings describe the landscape surrounding his home in the south of France near Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Sur la table points to the artist’s natal city, Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus. Chagall had declined to visit the city during his 1973 trip, “I have not seen Vitebsk for sixty years”, he explained. “What I should see there today would be incomprehensible to me. That which forms one of the living elements in my paintings would prove to be non-existent" (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall: A Biography, New York, 2008, p. 513).

The low wooden houses that populate the background of the present lot thus appear to be recollections from the artist’s boyhood in late nineteenth century Vitebsk. The buildings here are loose and morphic, their dark blue outlines dissolve into an inky wash, just as Chagall’s own memories of the city have hazed and blended over time. Attesting to the cultural legacy of his youth, the landscape is crowed by an orthodox church, an evocative symbol of pre-revolutionary Russia; the middle-ground is likewise populated by a host of musician figures, recalling the street fiddlers of Vitebsk, whose melodies provided the soundtrack for Chagall’s childhood.

Set against this fluid, dream-like ground is the principal subject of Sur La Table – the tabletop itself, upon which a vase of flowers rises like a tree above the monochromatic blue landscape. Overwhelming here in both its size and vibrancy, the floral bouquet is a perennial motif in Chagall's visual imagery, often used to symbolize love and joy. To the right of the towering blooms stand a bowl brimming with ripe fruit, a water glass, a plate and a knife. In the present lot Chagall inventively blurs inside and outside, uniting the landscape and still-life genres in a palette full of dramatic contrast. The artist’s use of intense colour can be attributed, like that of Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, to the bright, clear light and richly hued landscape of the Côte d’Azur, with its turquoise seas and lavender fields, where Chagall had moved in 1948.

The bright colouration of the present painting can also be attributed to Chagall’s recent work designing stained-glass windows. This medium became a fundamental aspect of the artist’s creative output from the early 1950s onwards, as Chagall was commissioned to create window designs for Reims Cathedral in France, Mainz Cathedral in Germany, Chichester Cathedral in the UK, the synagogue of Hadassah University Medical Centre in Jerusalem, and the United Nations headquarters in New York (for which he conceived the famous Peace Window). Through careful localisation of colour and texture – pitting warm hues against cool, and airy washes against rich impasto – in Sur La Table, Chagall conjures a pulsing and radiant canvas. This dynamic and innovative composition tracks Marc Chagall’s personal evolution, from his childhood in Vitebsk to his most recent experimentations as a mature artist.