La maison natale

Executed in 1964, La maison natale was created in the twilight years of what was a remarkably long, inspired and prolific artistic career. Settled in the verdant hills of the Alpes-Maritimes, Marc Chagall, then in his mid-seventies, was experiencing a period of joyful serenity and invigoration, tempered only by periods of intense reflection and retrospection. Alongside large-scale projects and important commissions– among them the celebrated ceiling of the Opéra Garnier and a window for the United Nations building installed that same year. His small-scale works of this period consistently emphasise the abiding importance of memory, evoking a dreamlike sense of nostalgia, articulated through an emblematic visual language that is uniquely his own.

Just as Pablo Picasso drew heavily on his ancestral Mediterranean roots in his late work– Chagall similarly mined the complex personal narrative of his itineracy. Settled in Vence, in the Côte d'Azur, the artist continued making art that illuminated his long life’s experiences and associative emotions. His extensive and personal iconography, enriched and embellished by imagination as much as memory, evoked his early years in Russia (present day Belarus), his admiration for Paris and the fertile French countryside, his wartime transatlantic exile to America– darkened by personal tragedy– and his eventual return to France.

La maison natale depicts the house where Chagall was born, which he recalls in his autobiography as ‘the lump on the head of the Rabbi in green whom I painted, or a potato thrown into a barrel of herrings and soaked in the brine’ (M. Chagall, My Life, New York, 1960, p. 10). The humble home was situated in Pestkovatik, just on the outskirts of his native Vitebsk. This, a traditional Shtetl, dominates the foreground of the present work. Vitebsk, recognisable at the time by its distinctive rural character and the dome of its iconic Orthodox church, became an enduring source of inspiration for Chagall, who referred to it as ‘the soil that nourished the roots of my art’ (M. Chagall, quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, Marc Chagall: 1887-1985, New York, 1998, p. 19).

Vitebsk remained vividly alive in Chagall’s mind following his departure for Paris in 1922, and although the artist would never again return to the small village, the place and his sentimental reminiscences of it never faded. Despite the difficulties of his childhood, beleaguered as his family experienced both poverty and religious persecution, Chagall’s recollections of his past and the vanished identity of his homeland continued to provide rich artistic inspiration throughout his life, emerging in the prototypical fantastical scenes depicted in the present work.

At the centre of the composition, as if emanating from the childhood home below it, a resplendent bouquet of flowers is envisioned, a motif repeatedly deployed throughout the artist’s work. More than a mere still-life or reference to nature, flowers served as a compelling symbol of love for Chagall– a visual embodiment of the joyous and blissful affection he felt for the people and places in his life.

Depicted with equal tenderness are the embracing lovers, figures often shown wafting beside floral arrangements in a number of Chagall’s most iconic works. Here, the lovers may be interpreted as a symbolic portrait of the artist and his beloved first wife and greatest muse, Bella Rosenfeld. The two met in Vitebsk in 1909, and Chagall claimed to have fallen in love with her instantly, recalling their first encounter: ‘Her silence is mine. Her eyes mine. I feel she has known me always, my childhood, my present life, my future; as if she were watching over me, divining my innermost being… I knew this is she, my wife...’ (Chagall, My Life, New York, 1960, p. 66).

They were married in 1915, enjoying a loving partnership until Bella’s sudden passing in New York in 1944. Her ghostly likeness persisted in numerous melancholic works following her tragic death. However, by the time La maison natale was created, Chagall was happily living with his second wife, Vava, who provided a steadfast, calming presence in his life. Contented in his new circumstances, Chagall was able to reflect on his earlier years with Bella and on the innocence of their youth, with fresh clarity.
The artist and his second wife, Valentina Brodsky, June 1962. Photographer unknown.
Although famed for his mastery of colour, Chagall was an equally adept draughtsman. Abraham Efross, Chagall's first biographer, recognised the importance of his monochromatic work as a crucial form of expression. ‘Chagall's black-and-white art,’ he wrote, ‘is even denser, more saturated and more forceful than his painting… In his graphic work, the stormy dynamism of his art reveals itself to us untrammelled. Black shreds, black specks, black patterns, black fragments of figures and objects, stiff and incredibly twisted, surprise the spectator, drag him into their vortex, and carry him along’ (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work, pp. 222 & 224).

La maison natale is remarkably expressive in this way, with a subtle infusion of blue ink interspersed with passages of varying shades of greys and black, accenting the oneiric quality that suffuses the scene. The spectral loving couple take shape above left, out of scale to the building as if to register their towering rapture for one another and as if conjured there by the artist’s present and recollected emotions, while the monumental exuberance of the flowers contrast with the shtetl’s unassuming simplicity, the wellspring of all that affection.

Chagall’s late works speak above all else of love and thus enjoy a universal appeal. They speak with a unique pictorial vocabulary whose motifs recur ritualistically, achieving a majestic quality through their observance, adhering to none but their own laws of representation