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Lot Essay
“So guide my hand. Take the brush and, like the leader of an orchestra, carry me off to far and unknown realms”
-Marc Chagall
Chagall painted Le Couple while living in Vence, in the sun-drenched south of France. The radiant blue that engulfs the work reflects the luminous Mediterranean light, sea and sky of the south, filling the composition with a vibrancy and iridescence. After the Second World War, the French Riviera emerged as a thriving artistic center, inhabited by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, with whom Chagall became good friends. Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s lover at the time, recalled that the Spanish artist 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” (Picasso quoted in F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 282). The suffusion of blue across Le Couple serves to unite the various components of the painting. Arranged like fragments of a dream, the motifs are figments of Chagall’s imagination, memories from the artist’s past, and images of his present life, creating a new, fantastical reality.
In 1959 when Le Couple was painted, the artist was married to his second wife, Valentina Brodsky or “Vava,” as Chagall called her. In 1944, while exiled in America for the duration of the Second World War, Chagall’s beloved first wife Bella Rosenfeld had died of an infection. He soon met Virginia McNeil, with whom the artist spent 7 years. Their relationship ended abruptly, however, and in 1952, Chagall met Vava. The couple married just a few months after meeting. This new love provided Chagall with much longed for stability and happiness for the rest of his life.
The memory of Bella however, never left Chagall, and she continued to appear in his paintings as a floating apparition; in Le Couple, she appears as a beautiful young woman, a nostalgic depiction of his past love. Chagall reminisced of Bella in his autobiography in 1947, “I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with [Bella]. Dressed all in white or all in black, she has long been flying over my canvases, guiding my art” (M. Chagall, My Life, London, 1957, p. 121).
The rooster features prominently in Chagall's personal mythology, its familiar, domesticated character looking back to the artist's rustic beginnings in Vitebsk: “the fowl yard...has its place in Chagall's recollections of his childhood. That is why poultry are always part of the Russian scenes painted during his first Paris period” (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 381). “For thousands of years it [the rooster] has played a part in religious rites as the embodiment of the forces of sun and fire. This symbolic meaning still lingers on in Chagall's work, where the cock represents elementary spiritual power” (ibid., pp. 380-381).
-Marc Chagall
Chagall painted Le Couple while living in Vence, in the sun-drenched south of France. The radiant blue that engulfs the work reflects the luminous Mediterranean light, sea and sky of the south, filling the composition with a vibrancy and iridescence. After the Second World War, the French Riviera emerged as a thriving artistic center, inhabited by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, with whom Chagall became good friends. Françoise Gilot, Picasso’s lover at the time, recalled that the Spanish artist 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” (Picasso quoted in F. Gilot and C. Lake, Life with Picasso, New York, 1964, p. 282). The suffusion of blue across Le Couple serves to unite the various components of the painting. Arranged like fragments of a dream, the motifs are figments of Chagall’s imagination, memories from the artist’s past, and images of his present life, creating a new, fantastical reality.
In 1959 when Le Couple was painted, the artist was married to his second wife, Valentina Brodsky or “Vava,” as Chagall called her. In 1944, while exiled in America for the duration of the Second World War, Chagall’s beloved first wife Bella Rosenfeld had died of an infection. He soon met Virginia McNeil, with whom the artist spent 7 years. Their relationship ended abruptly, however, and in 1952, Chagall met Vava. The couple married just a few months after meeting. This new love provided Chagall with much longed for stability and happiness for the rest of his life.
The memory of Bella however, never left Chagall, and she continued to appear in his paintings as a floating apparition; in Le Couple, she appears as a beautiful young woman, a nostalgic depiction of his past love. Chagall reminisced of Bella in his autobiography in 1947, “I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with [Bella]. Dressed all in white or all in black, she has long been flying over my canvases, guiding my art” (M. Chagall, My Life, London, 1957, p. 121).
The rooster features prominently in Chagall's personal mythology, its familiar, domesticated character looking back to the artist's rustic beginnings in Vitebsk: “the fowl yard...has its place in Chagall's recollections of his childhood. That is why poultry are always part of the Russian scenes painted during his first Paris period” (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, p. 381). “For thousands of years it [the rooster] has played a part in religious rites as the embodiment of the forces of sun and fire. This symbolic meaning still lingers on in Chagall's work, where the cock represents elementary spiritual power” (ibid., pp. 380-381).