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Lot Essay
Painting the present work in the early 1980s, Chagall was one of the greatest living masters of the modern movement. Faithful to the inspiration which had fired his art from the very beginning Chagall continued to paint with the same vigor and intensity that he had shown throughout his life. Old age never makes its appearance in Chagall's paintings after his early period. And given its rapturously romantic subject and the brilliant freshness of his motifs and colors, one might easily mistake Amoureux et bouquet dans le ciel for the work of a much younger man.
The scene here is a view of the old walled hilltop town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which Chagall could see, due south, from the studio window in his home 'Les Collines', which lay across the valley in the commune of Vence. The medieval spirit of old Provence lay everywhere around Chagall, and in deeper layers beneath that, the classical civilization of the ancient colony which the Romans called the Province. Chagall appears have lifted the image of these young lovers straight from the courtly traditions of the 12th century troubadors and their noble ladies, whose music of longing and impassioned poetry, among the first cast not in venerable church Latin but in the local vernacular, their langue d'oc, reveled in the refined sentiments they elicited from the newly born conception of romantic love, embodied here in the flaming reds of the burgeoning bouquet.
These amoureux, who have magically materialized in the sky, are Chagall himself and his beloved first wife Bella, who died in 1944, but who remained his eternal bride and forever the light of his life.
Much of Chagall's enduring immersion in Bella's memory was any man's nostalgia for the great love of his youth. Chagall was fortunate enough to have married his first true love, and he cultivated ever after these beautiful memories like a patient and ever mindful gardener. For Chagall at this stage of his life, as was also the case with Pablo Picasso, memory became the key to creativity: the desire to revisit and relive all the stages of a long and passionate life imparts a poignant dimension to the work of this artist's old age, in pictures that betoken a wisdom beyond words.
The scene here is a view of the old walled hilltop town of Saint-Paul-de-Vence, which Chagall could see, due south, from the studio window in his home 'Les Collines', which lay across the valley in the commune of Vence. The medieval spirit of old Provence lay everywhere around Chagall, and in deeper layers beneath that, the classical civilization of the ancient colony which the Romans called the Province. Chagall appears have lifted the image of these young lovers straight from the courtly traditions of the 12th century troubadors and their noble ladies, whose music of longing and impassioned poetry, among the first cast not in venerable church Latin but in the local vernacular, their langue d'oc, reveled in the refined sentiments they elicited from the newly born conception of romantic love, embodied here in the flaming reds of the burgeoning bouquet.
These amoureux, who have magically materialized in the sky, are Chagall himself and his beloved first wife Bella, who died in 1944, but who remained his eternal bride and forever the light of his life.
Much of Chagall's enduring immersion in Bella's memory was any man's nostalgia for the great love of his youth. Chagall was fortunate enough to have married his first true love, and he cultivated ever after these beautiful memories like a patient and ever mindful gardener. For Chagall at this stage of his life, as was also the case with Pablo Picasso, memory became the key to creativity: the desire to revisit and relive all the stages of a long and passionate life imparts a poignant dimension to the work of this artist's old age, in pictures that betoken a wisdom beyond words.