Nuit de Nouvel An

Painted between 1951 and 1953, Nuit de Nouvel An forms part of a small group of works created just after Marc Chagall moved to the South of France. The painting represents an emotional renaissance for the artist and his optimistic, albeit difficult reach towards a future unknown. Six years earlier, in September 1944, Chagall’s beloved wife, Bella, died while the two were living in New York, having fled the Second World War, and thus France, three years earlier. Chagall was distraught and, for only the second time of his life, found himself unable to paint or function. Nine months later, Virginia Haggard McNeil entered Chagall’s life as his housekeeper. Although still mourning the loss of his wife, he found an unexpected partner in Virginia, and their son David was born in June 1946. Two years later, in 1948, they, along with Virginia’s daughter Jean, returned to France as a family where they were reunited with Chagall’s daughter, Ida.
Although initially excited to be back in France, Chagall was wracked with anxiety and terror, owing to both the loss of Bella, as well as his fears for those, including his sisters, trapped in Soviet Russia. To alleviate his angst and sadness, the Chagalls sought refuge in the South of France where, in 1949, they spent four months on the Côte d'Azur, visiting with Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and the dealer Aimé Maeght and his wife Marguerite, among others. The crystalline skies and balmy weather proved the perfect remedy for Chagall, who began to paint again.
Reflecting later on the role this landscape played within Chagall's aesthetic development during these years, Franz Meyer wrote, ‘The new environment is responsible not only for the view from his window on the little old walled town and the steeple of the medieval cathedral, which appears in so many of his pictures, but also for the novel charm of the painterly mood which embraces all things that grow and blossom’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall Life and Work, New York, 1965, pp. 501-502). The glorious sunshine was curative, so much so that Chagall and Virginia decided to move to Provence permanently. On Ida’s advice, he purchased, in 1950, a dilapidated belle époque villa situated on the road between Vence and St. Jeannet, which was known as Les Collines.
In the works during Chagall’s initial years at Les Collines, joy and sorrow are intermingled. As I.F. Walter and R. Metzger have noted, ‘After his return to France, Chagall’s work still remained a poetic metaphor for his turbulent life history, a balancing act negotiating dream and reality, an adventure of the imagination that made the invisible visible and thus real’ (I.F. Walther and R. Metzger, Marc Chagall: Painting as Poetry, Cologne, 2000, p. 77). The colours may have remained opulently jewel toned, but they were now tinged with shadows and black scumbling.
In Nuit de Nouvel An, the figure in the foreground holding an axe symbolises death, specifically that of Bella. The tall, stately clock alludes to the passage of time and was an image Chagall had used previously in La pendule à l'aile bleue, 1949, a composition that, when he saw it again decades later, he is purported to have said, ‘How unhappy I must have been to paint that’ (M. Chagall quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall: Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 450). And although his life was now in Provence, Chagall nevertheless continued to be moved by memories of his native village Vitebsk in Russia, and he filled the pictorial village square of Nuit de Nouvel An with a horse and gabled rooftops. Yet hope, the painting seems to say, is not entirely lost, and in the mother cradling her child are intimations of rebirth. Indeed, such a renewal is referred to in the work’s title, Nuit de Nouvel An, which suggests that though time’s passage may be saddening, it is also restorative.