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Lot Essay
A poetic vision of romantic love, Le soleil rouge or Le soleil des amoureux was painted by Marc Chagall in 1949, just a year after the artist returned to France following half a decade living in the United States. By this stage of his career, Chagall had reached a new level of international acclaim, thanks to a series of key exhibitions and events that brought his unique style and kaleidoscopic visual lexicon to the attention of a broad public audience. An important retrospective of his work was staged at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1946, and was followed by a solo exhibition at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris just a few months later, which subsequently travelled to London and Amsterdam. The artist was also awarded the Grand Prix de Gravure at the Venice Biennale in September 1948, in recognition of his illustrations of the classic novel Les âmes mortes (Dead Souls), commissioned by Ambroise Vollard in 1923 but only completed and published twenty-five years later. These experiences reinforced Chagall’s confidence and sense of purpose as an artist after years of upheaval in his professional and personal life during the Second World War, and brought a new ambition and energy to his ensuing work.
In many ways, Le soleil rouge represents a continuation of the central themes that had marked Chagall’s paintings for much of the late 1940s. As Inigo F. Walter and Rainer Metzger have observed, “After his return to France, Chagall’s work still remained a poetic metaphor for his turbulent life history, a balancing act negotiating dream and reality, an adventure of the imagination that made the invisible visible and thus real” (Marc Chagall: Painting as Poetry, Cologne, 2000, p. 77). The unexpected death of his beloved wife Bella in New York in 1944 had left the artist bereft. When he returned to painting, his profound love and nostalgia for his marriage with Bella proved a fundamental underpinning for his creative vision. At the same time, the arrival of a new woman in his life injected Chagall’s canvases with a renewed vivacity and sensual energy. Virginia Haggard McNeill, a British woman in her early thirties with a young daughter, had been hired as a housekeeper for the artist in New York following Bella’s passing. The pair soon began a relationship, with French as their shared language. Indeed, these two loves—a blissful twenty-nine-year-long marriage with Bella, and this exciting new romantic liaison—dominated Chagall’s imagination through this period, standing as contrasting, yet complementary experiences.
In Le soleil rouge, the central character appears to be based on Virginia, her lithe, elegant figure, long hair and contemporary blue dress typical of the artist’s depictions of his paramour. Clutching a delicately painted bouquet of large white roses, her elongated form fills the full stretch of the canvas, swooping diagonally through the sky in a gentle curve. She is embraced by a male figure dressed all in yellow, his expression radiating joy and affection as he wraps his arms around her, while a violinist floating nearby serenades them with her music. Along the right edge of the canvas, a bride and groom appear beneath a chuppah, most likely a reference to Chagall’s own union with Bella three decades prior, their forms inverted, as if they have been completely freed from the constraints of gravity. Large bouquets of daisies and lilacs flank the central figures, appearing almost like an offering from the trio of human and animal characters that hover in the lower half of the composition, the profusion of blooms suggesting new life and the enduring beauty of the natural world. Together, these disparate elements come together to conjure a distinctly romantic atmosphere, infusing the scene with a sense of the happiness, passion and serenity these relationships brought the artist.
There is a richness and power to the pigments in Le soleil rouge, inspired by Chagall’s trip to the exclusive resort of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in January of 1949, following an invitation from his close friend, the Greek-born art critic, publisher and patron Tériade. Like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Pierre Bonnard before him, Chagall found the Mediterranean an irresistibly stimulating environment in which to live and work. Virginia later recalled that their arrival in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat resulted in an outpouring of creativity from the artist: “His store of ‘Chagall’ material was jolted and injected with new substance, producing a series of variations around the theme…” (My Life with Chagall, New York, 1986, pp. 89-90). Though set against a dark, black background that suggests a nighttime setting, the glowing red sun of Le soleil rouge upends our understanding of the scene. This appears to be a world that exists outside conventional time, where night and day, the past and the present, memory and fantasy, all combine, creating a cohesive, yet mysterious image.
The subject and composition of Le soleil rouge continued to captivate Chagall after the painting’s completion—two years later, he revisited the image, using it as the basis for the design of a large tapestry project. Having recently completed murals for the Watergate Theatre in London, Chagall was increasingly interested in working on monumental commissions intended for a particular architectural space. The sweeping lines, bold color combinations and interactions of the characters in Le soleil rouge seemed particularly well-suited to such a project, and the artist explored translating it into a new medium. Though the final tapestry was never realized, Chagall created a large gouache cartoon for its fabrication in 1951 (Un monde rouge et noir; Private collection) increasing the scale of the original painting and adjusting certain details to make them more legible. For example, the small town in the lower right corner is delineated with greater clarity, while the painter before his easel seen in Le soleil rouge is exchanged for a horse and cart moving across the landscape. Similarly, the goat to the left now carries the large bouquet and is given more prominence in the gouache, its body following the sinuous lines of the woman’s form as she stretches across the sheet.
Revealing the rich multiplicity of Chagall’s practice during these years, as he worked across different media, Le soleil rouge remained in the artist’s personal collection until his death, and was acquired shortly thereafter for the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1989.
In many ways, Le soleil rouge represents a continuation of the central themes that had marked Chagall’s paintings for much of the late 1940s. As Inigo F. Walter and Rainer Metzger have observed, “After his return to France, Chagall’s work still remained a poetic metaphor for his turbulent life history, a balancing act negotiating dream and reality, an adventure of the imagination that made the invisible visible and thus real” (Marc Chagall: Painting as Poetry, Cologne, 2000, p. 77). The unexpected death of his beloved wife Bella in New York in 1944 had left the artist bereft. When he returned to painting, his profound love and nostalgia for his marriage with Bella proved a fundamental underpinning for his creative vision. At the same time, the arrival of a new woman in his life injected Chagall’s canvases with a renewed vivacity and sensual energy. Virginia Haggard McNeill, a British woman in her early thirties with a young daughter, had been hired as a housekeeper for the artist in New York following Bella’s passing. The pair soon began a relationship, with French as their shared language. Indeed, these two loves—a blissful twenty-nine-year-long marriage with Bella, and this exciting new romantic liaison—dominated Chagall’s imagination through this period, standing as contrasting, yet complementary experiences.
In Le soleil rouge, the central character appears to be based on Virginia, her lithe, elegant figure, long hair and contemporary blue dress typical of the artist’s depictions of his paramour. Clutching a delicately painted bouquet of large white roses, her elongated form fills the full stretch of the canvas, swooping diagonally through the sky in a gentle curve. She is embraced by a male figure dressed all in yellow, his expression radiating joy and affection as he wraps his arms around her, while a violinist floating nearby serenades them with her music. Along the right edge of the canvas, a bride and groom appear beneath a chuppah, most likely a reference to Chagall’s own union with Bella three decades prior, their forms inverted, as if they have been completely freed from the constraints of gravity. Large bouquets of daisies and lilacs flank the central figures, appearing almost like an offering from the trio of human and animal characters that hover in the lower half of the composition, the profusion of blooms suggesting new life and the enduring beauty of the natural world. Together, these disparate elements come together to conjure a distinctly romantic atmosphere, infusing the scene with a sense of the happiness, passion and serenity these relationships brought the artist.
There is a richness and power to the pigments in Le soleil rouge, inspired by Chagall’s trip to the exclusive resort of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in January of 1949, following an invitation from his close friend, the Greek-born art critic, publisher and patron Tériade. Like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Pierre Bonnard before him, Chagall found the Mediterranean an irresistibly stimulating environment in which to live and work. Virginia later recalled that their arrival in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat resulted in an outpouring of creativity from the artist: “His store of ‘Chagall’ material was jolted and injected with new substance, producing a series of variations around the theme…” (My Life with Chagall, New York, 1986, pp. 89-90). Though set against a dark, black background that suggests a nighttime setting, the glowing red sun of Le soleil rouge upends our understanding of the scene. This appears to be a world that exists outside conventional time, where night and day, the past and the present, memory and fantasy, all combine, creating a cohesive, yet mysterious image.
The subject and composition of Le soleil rouge continued to captivate Chagall after the painting’s completion—two years later, he revisited the image, using it as the basis for the design of a large tapestry project. Having recently completed murals for the Watergate Theatre in London, Chagall was increasingly interested in working on monumental commissions intended for a particular architectural space. The sweeping lines, bold color combinations and interactions of the characters in Le soleil rouge seemed particularly well-suited to such a project, and the artist explored translating it into a new medium. Though the final tapestry was never realized, Chagall created a large gouache cartoon for its fabrication in 1951 (Un monde rouge et noir; Private collection) increasing the scale of the original painting and adjusting certain details to make them more legible. For example, the small town in the lower right corner is delineated with greater clarity, while the painter before his easel seen in Le soleil rouge is exchanged for a horse and cart moving across the landscape. Similarly, the goat to the left now carries the large bouquet and is given more prominence in the gouache, its body following the sinuous lines of the woman’s form as she stretches across the sheet.
Revealing the rich multiplicity of Chagall’s practice during these years, as he worked across different media, Le soleil rouge remained in the artist’s personal collection until his death, and was acquired shortly thereafter for the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1989.