Marc Chagall

Estate of the artist

Private Collection (acquired from the above in 1985 and sold: Sotheby's, New York, November 12, 1996, lot 62)

Acquired from the above

Taipei, Memorial Sun Yat Sen, Marc Chagall,1993

Seoul, Ohoh Am Art Gallery, Chagall, 1993

Beijing, Palais des Beaux-Arts de Chine, Marc Chagall, 1994

Hong Kong, Museum of Art, Chagall, 1994

Vence, Fondation Emile Hugues, Marc Chagall, les années méditerranéennes, 1994

Excellent condition. Original canvas. The thick impasto of the flowers is beautifully intact. Small flecks of primed canvas are exposed along the periphery, probably due to frame abrasion, mostly along the left edge, and most notably to the left of the female figure's head, at the lower left edge and the top edge at the left above the male figure's head. Under UV, other than one tiny spot in the upper-right quadrant in the flowers, there is no evidence of retouching.
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The central figures dominating the present work are a pair of lovers - a reference to the love of Chagall's youth, Bella. Love and marriage were an important part of Chagall's life, as well as a recurring theme in his painting. His first great love Bella Rosenfeld was also from the artist's native Vitebsk, and remained a powerful symbol of his homeland, while his second wife, Vava Brodsky, was always associated for Chagall with France, where he lived at the time and where the two met. These highly personal and romantic symbols of his life both in Russia and in France are harmoniously combined in La Femme du peintre.

When Chagall painted this picture in 1970, he was married to Vava and living in Vence in the South of France.  The journalist Alexander Liberman, who visited Chagall there in the late 1950s, described the intricacy of Chagall's paintings and the lush colors that characterize these works: "Like a human being, a Chagall painting reveals its rich complexity only if one has lived with it and in it, in the way the artist has during its creation. One must look at his paintings closely to experience their full power. After the impact of the overall effect, there is the joy of the close-up discovery. In this intimate scrutiny, the slightest variation takes on immense importance. We cannot concentrate for a long time; our senses tire quickly and we need, after moments of intense stimulation, periods of rest. Chagall understands this visual secret better than most painters; he draws our interest into a corner where minute details hold it, and when we tire of that, we rest, floating in a space of color, until the eye lands on a new small island of quivering life" (A. Liberman, "The Artist in His Studio," 1958, reprinted in Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Chagall: A Retrospective (exhibition catalogue), China, 1995, p. 337). 

 

The present picture is a quintessential example of Chagall's mastery in assembling an array of  folkloric images in a dense and colorful  composition. This work contains several of the most crucial elements in the artist's pictorial iconography: symbols of his agrarian roots and domesticity and a landscape evoking both the villages of his childhood home in Russia and the Mediterranean coastal towns in the south of France. Each figure is rendered through the matrix of intense colors and spatial experimentation that epitomizes Chagall's strongest work.