Marc Chagall

Estate of the artist

Werner Schmalenbach & Charles Sorlier, Marc Chagall, Frankfurt, 1979, illustrated p. 112

The canvas is not lined; the colours have remained bright and the impasto on the flowers is well preserved. UV examination shows no traces of inpainting. This work is in excellent original condition.
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In Chagall's mature œuvre, the artist's aesthetic vocabulary was so well established that he was able to tackle a wide variety of subjects on a single canvas. This splendid oil from 1969, with its combination of folkloric and personal symbolism, encompasses many of the themes for which the artist is renowned. In the foreground two lovers are depicted bathed in the moonlight beside a magnificent spray of flowers, while in the background a pair of dancers seems to emerge from the famed dome of the Paris opera house. The entire scene is drenched in a phosphorescent turquoise glow which accentuates the golden crescent moon and bright fuchsia blossoms. “That he is a Russian may account for his surprising Byzantine colour,” the art historian and curator Katherine Kuh once remarked, “but scarcely explains his indifference to normal laws of gravity” (Katherine Kuh, 'The Pleasure of Chagall's Paintings', in Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 149).

From his first years in Paris, Chagall enthusiastically filled his compositions with topographical references to his adopted city; in particular he continually depicted its famous landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, Sacré Cœur and Notre-Dame.  By the 1960s, he was no longer living in the capital, but had moved to the south of France with his second wife Valentina. Yet his canvases continued to feature nostalgic references to Paris, which represented his early years in France when he lived with his first wife Bella (who died tragically after the Second World War) and their young daughter Ida. Chagall is considered one of the great biographical artists of the 20th century, as he invests all of his pictures with deeply personal images ranging from his humble beginnings in Belarus (often represented through rural imagery, animals and minstrels), his first domestic bliss and artistic success in Paris, and his renewed happiness with Valentina in the later years of his life. L’Avenue de L’Opéra is a quintessential example of his ability to fuse all of these references within one extraordinary composition.

The Avenue de L’Opéra itself was of course of particular personal relevance to the artist, as in 1962 André Malraux had commissioned him to paint a new ceiling for Charles Garnier’s majestic opera house which gave its name to the broad Haussmannian street depicted here leading to its steps. Malraux’s choice of artist had initially caused controversy, with some objecting to a Russian Jew decorating a French national monument and others simply aghast at a nineteenth-century historic building being painted by a modern artist. The project took the 77-year-old artist a year to complete at a Gobélins atelier and the final canvas was nearly 220 square metres and required 200 kilograms of paint. The images Chagall painted for the ceiling paid tribute to the composers Mozart, Wagner, Mussorgsky, Berlioz and Ravel, as well as to famous actors and dancers and also, like the present work, depicted the façade of the Opéra Garnier itself. When the ceiling was unveiled to the public on 23 September 1964 in the presence of Malraux and 2,100 invited guests, the response was overwhelmingly positive, and the press unanimously declared Chagall's new work to be a great contribution to French culture. Malraux later exclaimed, "What other living artist could have painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera in the way Chagall did? ... He is above all one of the great colourists of our time... many of his canvases and the Opera ceiling represent sublime images that rank among the finest poetry of our time, just as Titian produced the finest poetry of his day.” (quoted in Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Marc Chagall, Cologne, 1998). Thus the magical atmosphere of this nocturnal scene is not only a joyful evocation of Chagall’s first Parisian period with Bella but also of the success he enjoyed in later life when he returned to the capital to work on this prestigious commission celebrating the arts.

As elsewhere in Chagall’s work, the urban topography and biographical references in L’Avenue de L’Opéra are juxtaposed with an Arcadian floral motif.  Flowers feature prominently as subject matter throughout his career, chosen not for rigorous studies in realism, but rather as expressive evocations of fantasy in their conflation of still-life, narrative motifs, and landscape. Like Henri Matisse, Chagall resided in Saint-Paul-de Vence from the 1950s and was inspired by the splendour and luminosity of the Côte d'Azur to experiment with bold colours and unstructured compositions. According to Chagall's biographer Franz Meyer, "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 colour 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" (Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, London, 1964, p. 519). In L'Avenue de l'Opéra, a bouquet of pink and white flowers erupts from a vase to dominate the foreground of the ostensible city scene, with an extreme boldness of colour and dynamic energy which bespeaks the fantasy and exuberance of Chagall's own inner world.

This work is a therefore an iconographical rendering of personal happiness, represented by the explosive form of the colourful bouquet and the surrounding images of Chagall's favourite themes including: a husband and wife, dancers and the city of Paris. The flowers of the bouquet are magnificently oversized compared with the figures, which conveys to the viewer a sense of abundance and whimsy, while the thickly painted electric pink and white of the petals gives the work a brilliant energy. As with many other paintings from this period, Chagall employs blueish green tones to create a sense of mysticism, alluding to the spiritual significance these colours hold in religious iconography and adding a supernatural dimension to the nocturnal cityscape in a fitting homage to the place he held so dear.