Marc Chagall

Private Collection, Japan

Private Collection, Japan

Acquired from the above in 1997

Painted in the late 1940s, La Mère et l’enfant embodies the new optimism and hope that characterizes Chagall’s work from this important period of transition. Having initially struggled to adapt to life in the United States, Chagall had achieved great success there, culminating in the 1946 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. By this time he was also slowly beginning to recover from the tragedy of Bella’s death in 1944, and had begun a relationship with Virginia Haggard McNeil with whom he would father a son, David. Whereas the works painted in the years directly following his 1941 arrival in the United States are often dark meditations on the increasingly bleak situation in Europe, his post-war works, and particularly those painted following his return to France in 1948, show a slow shift towards the more colorful positivity that characterizes so much of his earlier work.

La Mère et l’enfant makes full play of the artist’s beguiling and deeply personal imagery. Significantly, the female figure is not presented as a lover, but as an emblem of motherhood. This was a vision of womanhood that Chagall evoked in a number of paintings from this period possibly prompted by the birth of his son in 1946. He had visited this theme in the 1930s with works such as La madone du village (1938-42, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) which shows the young child crowned with a halo. In the present work Chagall depicts the child without this direct biblical allusion, in a more simple expression of the joys of motherhood.

These figures are set against a background that further emphasizes the sense of regeneration and the celebration of life. At the center of the composition is a glorious still life; flowers are part of the cornucopia of motifs that reoccur throughout Chagall’s oeuvre, and they carry a special significance, as André Verdet explains: "Marc Chagall loved flowers. He delighted in their aroma, in contemplating their colors. For a long time, certainly after 1948 when he moved for good to the South of France after his wartime stay in the U.S., there were always flowers in his studio. In his work bouquets of flowers held a special place… Usually they created a sense of joy, but they could also reflect the melancholy of memories" (A. Verdet, in J. Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall: A Retrospective, Fairfield, 1995, p. 347). The cockerel that floats above their heads also has a particular significance. As Franz Meyer notes, the bird had for thousands of years "played a part in religious rites as the embodiment of the forces of the sun and fire. This symbolic meaning still lingers on in Chagall’s work, where the cock represents elementary spiritual power" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall. Life and Work, New York, 1963, p. 380). In the present work, the prominence of the cockerel might also suggest the artist’s presence in the composition.

Color was always central to Chagall’s art, but it took on a new significance in the years following the Second World War, when he returned to France and settled in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on the Mediterranean coast. Like many artists before him, he was captivated by the unique intensity of light and color that he found there. Franz Meyer writes, "The light, the vegetation, the rhythm of life all contributed to the rise of a more relaxed airy, sensuous style in which the magic of color dominates more and more with the passing years. At Vence he witnessed the daily miracle of growth and blossoming in the mild, strong all-pervading light – an experience in which earth and matter had their place" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, London, 1964, p. 519). Chagall acknowledged this, describing his reinvigorated understanding in a lecture delivered in 1958: "Upon my return to France, at the end of the war, I had the vision of glowing colors, not decorative and screaming ones, and I rediscovered Claude Monet, with his natural source of colors. Now I feel the presence of a color which is the color of love" (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, Chagall. A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 181).