Marc Chagall

Frederick Knize, Vienna, Paris & New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1947

New York, Galerie Chalette, Chagall: A Selection of Paintings from American Museums and Private Collections, 1958, no. 5 (as dating from 1914)

Philadelphia Museum of Art & London, Royal Academy of Arts, Marc Chagall, 1984-85, no. 45 , illustrated in color in the catalogue (as dating from 1914)

New York, The Jewish Museum & Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marc Chagall, 1996-97

Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1963, discussed p. 333

Werner Schmalenbach, Bilder des 20. Jahrhunderts, Die Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Düsseldorf, Munich, 1986, p. 60

Jacob Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall, A Retrospective, New York, 1995, illustrated in color p. 115

Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Marc Chagall, New York, 1995, illustrated in color p. 119

Good condition. The canvas has been lined. Under ultra-violet light, there are scattered spots of old and more recent retouching throughout the composition which are handled fairly well. The older retouching, which comprises the majority of the restoration, may well have been done by artist himself, as is common for many pictures from this era. The paint layer is stable, and the colors are fresh.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

One of the most important images resulting from Chagall's eight-year exile in Vitebsk, the present work is the product of the rich cultural surroundings that filled his imagination in the early 1920s.   During this era he produced some of the most personally meaningful compositions of his career, developing the symbolism and imagery to which he would repeatedly return over the next five decades.  Jour de fête (Le Rabbin au citron), painted around 1924, two years after his return to Paris, is the pendant of a nearly identical composition that Chagall had completed during those first months in Vitebsk in 1914.  This powerful subject, which lingered in his mind for a decade, ranks among the artist's most influential compositions.

Chagall had planned his visit to Vitebsk in 1914 to be brief, but political circumstances prohibited him to return to Paris for several years.  In June 1914 Chagall traveled to Berlin to attend the opening of his first one-man show consisting of 40 oils and 160 gouaches at Herwarth Walden's Galerie der Sturm. On June 15 he returned to Vitebsk to attend his sister's wedding. It had been his intention to stay for three months before returning to Paris, but the outbreak of World War I made this impossible and he remained in Russia for the next eight years. After the excitement of Paris and Berlin, the provincial atmosphere of Vitebsk depressed him at first, but he soon found that the rich cultural and religious life of his birthplace offered a remarkable range of subject matter for him to explore.

Jour de fête (Le Rabbin au citron) represents an aspect of Jewish ritual.  As described by Susan Compton: "In his right hand, the rabbi holds an etrog, a lemon, and in his left the lulav, a palm branch, to which are tied a branch of myrtle and willow. This identifies the feast of the title with Succot, the Feast of the Tabernacles, which Chagall presented in another form in 1917. The Feast is first mentioned in Leviticus XXIII, 40, 'On the first day you shall take the fruit of citrus trees, palm fronds, and leafy branches, and willows from the riverside, and you shall rejoice before the Lord your God for seven days.' The artist has added a touch of fantasy in the doppelganger perched on the rabbi's head. Dressed slightly differently and lacking the ritual emblems, the 'other' faces away from his host as though reluctant to celebrate the Feast. Or maybe he simply represents 'another', the one who 'gets on my back': Chagall's symbol is a potent myth with multiple possible interpretations. Another paradox in the scene is the doorway on the left: the harvest thanksgiving feast is associated with a temporary building, a tabernacle, but the artist has introduced a permanent doorway to suggest frontiers of different realities, as he had with the open door of the tomb in Resurrection of Lazarus.  However, he has adopted a quite different style here, with no suggestion of the fraternization with Cubism that had occupied him in Paris" (Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p. 188).

 

The first version of this painting is now in the collection of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Chagall returned to this theme in Paris around 1924 when he painted replicas of some of his most celebrated earlier paintings, including the work under discussion, L'Anniversaire  and Le Juif en noir et blanc.  Since his studio in La Ruche had been looted at the beginning of the war and most of his early works were in Germany or Russia, he had very few points of reference as far as his own work was concerned. Hence the decision to produce replicas which he painted either from memory or with the help of photographs.

 

The present work is a faithful replica of the 1914 version, differing only in the decision not to crop the small figure standing on top of the rabbi's head. The major difference today is that the tone of violet used in the Düsseldorf picture has faded considerably. Discussing this important group of replicas and variants, Franz Meyer commented that "for Chagall the motif has an intrinsic value of its own and can therefore, in an almost medieval sense, be separated from the individual achievement and utilized again and again.  Needless to say, the impact of the contemporary stylistic phase and the contemporary stylistic transposition of the motif vary according to whether a picture is a replica, a variant, or a new version of a former work" (F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 324).

The first owner of this work, Frederick Knize, was born Fritz Wolff-Knize in Vienna in 1890.  Knize, who died in 1949, was well-known as a collector of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka.