Marc Chagall

Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist on June 5, 1929 and sold on December 16, 1929)

Private Collection, Switzerland (by 1933)

Max Wyler, Zürich

Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner in the 1960s

Zürich, Kunsthaus; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Marc Chagall, 1967

Original canvas. Under UV light, some inpainting visible mainly in dancer and horse's heads, as well as the figure's right and hand and thigh. A few spots on the back of the horse. Otherwise, this work is in good condition. Colors: The blue is less warm and the yellow and green tones are much fresher and more pronounced in the original.
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Danseuse au cirque, 1929, is one of Chagall's earliest and most important interpretations of a theme that would come to dominate his career.  This stunning canvas evidences the artist's pleasure in depicting the visual splendor of the circus and the dancers and acrobats that made the event so entertaining.  Throughout his career, Chagall drew great creative energy from watching the event, and some of his most important canvases are fantastic depictions that exaggerate the pageantry of the performance.  "It's a magic world, the circus," Chagall once wrote, "an age-old game that is danced, and in which tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of great art....The circus is the performance that seems to me the most tragic. Throughout the centuries, it has been man's most piercing cry in his search for entertainment and joy.  It often takes the form of lofty poetry.  I seem to see a Don Quixote in search of an ideal, like that marvellous clown who wept and dreamed of human love."

 

Although this picture is specifically concerned with a dancer astride a horse, these characters had many levels of significance for the artist.  To him, they represented the many faces of man's emotional character, both fun-loving and tragic.  He once wrote, "I have always considered the clowns, acrobats, and actors as being tragically human who, for me, would resemble characters from certain religious paintings.  And even today, when I paint a Crucifixion or another religious painting, I experience again almost the same sensations that I felt while painting circus people, and yet there is nothing literary in these paintings, and it is very difficult to explain why I find a psycho-plastic resemblance between the two kinds of composition."

Chagall's fascination with the circus dates back to his childhood in Vitebsk and his years in Paris when he frequently attended the circus with Ambroise Vollard (see figs. 2 and 3). As Venturi explained, "The importance of the circus motif in modern French literature and painting is well known; in painting it suffices to recall the names of Seurat and Rouault. As always, Chagall's images of circus people ... are at once burlesque and tender. Their perspective of sentiment, their fantastic forms, suggest that the painter is amusing himself in a freer mood than usual; and the result is eloquent of the unmistakable purity flowing from Chagall's heart.  These circus scenes are mature realizations of earlier dreams" (Lionello Venturi, Marc Chagall, New York, 1945, p. 39).