Marc Chagall

Leicester Galleries, London

Museum of Fine Arts of Houston, Chagall and de Chirico, 1955, n.n.

Executed on buff-colored wove paper. Attached to a mount along side edges and in center spot of bottom edge. At side edges, white pigment had been added, presumably by a later hand, to the mount and also on extreme edges of sheet. Artist's pinholes in bottom two corners. A few minor flecks of loss in the white pigments at the lower right corner. Sheet is slightly wavy but stable. Colors are bright and fresh. Work is in good condition.
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Paris was the crucible for avant-garde painters, writers, and critical thinkers responsible for most innovations at the turn of the 20^th century.  After arriving in France from Russia in 1910, Chagall was mesmerized by the City of Lights that was then the center of the enlightened universe.  At 23 years of age, the young painter was thrust into an artistic scene dominated by the newly-established style of painting dubbed Cubism.  Unlike most painters working in Paris at that time, Chagall was an unabashed celebrator of color, producing a different body of work than that of his contemporaries.

After making the difficult transition to France, for the artist spoke only Russian initially, Chagall immersed himself in the milieu of the painters working in Montmartre.  It was here, perhaps driven by his longing for Russia, where Chagall began his lifelong exploration of Russian subjects and that the artist first tried his hand at working with a new medium, gouache.  So successful was he, that he produced a number of works that are considered some of the best in his oeuvre. 

After an auspicious start in Parisian art circles, Chagall was invited by Herwarth Walden to exhibit at the Galerie der Sturm in Berlin.  With the idea of traveling on to Russia from Berlin in order to marry his fiancée Bella Rosenfeld, Chagall took forty paintings and 160 gouaches, watercolors and ink drawings that were shown to great critical acclaim. 

Not long after his arrival in Russia the Great War broke out and his plans to return to Paris were complicated with the border closing between the Russian Empire which was now at war with the Prussian Empire.  Further difficulties erupted when the Russian Revolution broke out in 1917.  The post-Revolution's period of socio-political instability created an opportunity for Chagall, where he accepted the position as commissar of arts for Vitebsk.  During his tenure there, Chagall founded the Vitebsk Arts College, an institution that would become one of the most formidable art schools in the new Soviet Union.  However, differences of  aesthetic opinion between Kasimir Malevich, who favored a Suprematist approach to art and Chagall, who favored artists' individuality, forced Chagall to abandon his position and ultimately, to move back to France in 1923. 

Whilst Chagall was returning to Paris, he stopped in Berlin with the hope to recover his paintings that he left at Galerie der Sturm almost a decade earlier.  After a year of  unsuccessful litigation he had left Berlin, unable to retrieve any of the pictures he had left there on exhibit ten years earlier.  Nonetheless, after returning to Paris Chagall again "rediscovered the free expansion and fulfillment which were so essential to him," writes Michael Lewis. With all his early works now lost, he began trying to paint from his memories of his earliest years in Vitebsk with sketches and oil paintings (M. J. Lewis, "Whatever Happened to Marc Chagall?" Commentary, October, 2008 pgs. 36-37).

Chagall's long-anticipated return to France, with his bride Bella, made him complete.  He was again immersed in a climate that proved to spawn his creative genius.  Werner Haftmann writes, "This new approach to color and its atmospheric quality speaks eloquently of the effect that the new-old environment- France and its light- was having on the painter.  In his first sojourn he had only known Paris.  Now he was discovering the French countryside and the way people lived in it.  Repeatedly he left Paris for the country places.  In 1924 he spent the summer in Brittany; in 1925 he frequently in Montchauvet.  ...in the Summer (of 1926) he was in Chambon-sur-Lac in the Auvergne.  He was making the landscape, light, and life of France intimately his own" (W. Haftmann, Marc Chagall, Gouaches, Drawings, Watercolors, New York, 1975, p. 83).  Haftmann continues, "If many details still recall the scenes from Russian village life, Chagall nonetheless captured the real look and feel of an old French village beneath a luminous gray late-afternoon sky... Further, his color modulated over gray and earth colors and the finely tuned harmony of his colors truly evoke the French earth" (Ibid. p. 84).

Fig.  The church at Chambon-sur-Lac, France