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Lot Essay
The 1960s was a period of great productivity and expanding creativity for Marc Chagall – recognised internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation, he was increasingly occupied by large scale public commissions in a diverse array of media, from tapestries to mosaics, stained glass windows to grand murals. Chagall’s imagination was invigorated and fuelled by these experiments, each project sparking a renewed interest in certain motifs and themes as he explored new avenues of creativity. Painted in 1964, Tête de cheval en rouge avec couple en bleu aux fleurs is a lyrical example of Chagall’s mature painterly vision, and the continuing spirit of invention that ran through his work.
Against a light-filled background of vigorously impastoed, luminous colour, Tête de cheval en rouge avec couple en bleu aux fleurs features a collection of some of the most recognisable motifs from Chagall’s personal iconography. Playing with scale and perception, Chagall layers the various characters over one another in a seemingly weightless configuration, bringing them together in a dynamic composition. The body of a horse dominates the large canvas, its form surrounded by a floating bride adorned in a diaphanous white veil, and a man clutching a brimming bouquet of blossoming flowers. A rooster and other figures hover on the peripheries of this fantastical vision, appearing like figments of a dream or images from a distant memory. Each of these subjects had a deeply personal symbolism for Chagall: the bride invokes memories the artist’s great love and first wife, Bella Rosenfeld, and the man, the figure of the artist himself, presenting flowers, a symbol of romance, to his young love.
Executed in vibrant tones of orange and red, the large horse was a motif that held a potent symbolic and personal resonance for Chagall, invoking memories of his early life in Vitebsk, where horses and other farm animals were intertwined in the very fabric of the life of the town. Despite living, working and travelling in a variety of cities around the world, from St Petersburg and Berlin, to Paris and New York, his memories of his youth in Vitebsk continued to inform Chagall’s art throughout his career. ‘In my pictures,’ he explained, ‘there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land’ (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall, A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 25). More than simply a reference to Vitebsk, however, the horse came to embody a sense of freedom and escapism in the artist’s work, pictured most frequently in the magical realm of the circus. As Chagall explained in 1966, just two years after he painted the present composition, ‘All my life I have drawn horses… At the sight of horses, who are always in a state of ecstasy, I think: are they not, perhaps, happier than we? … I hear the echo of the horses’ hooves in the pit of my stomach. I could race on a horse for the first time and the last time, to the brilliant arena of life’ (‘The Circus’, 1966; quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 153).
Tête de cheval en rouge avec couple en bleu aux fleurs is also a rich illustration of Chagall’s virtuosity in the realm of colour during this period of his career: from the brilliant hue of the red horse, to the complementary deep blue tones chosen to depict the couple, and the small flashes of lilac, crimson and yellow of the blooms in the bouquet, the entire canvas is bursting with a vivid play of pigment. This mastery of colour brought Chagall a new generation of enthusiastic supporters during the post-war period, his confident and bold choice of tones imbuing his work with a vital energy. Using a mixture of oil paint and tempera in the present canvas, Chagall also introduces an intriguing sense of texture to the work, contrasting the different materialities of the pigments against one another. In certain sections of the picture he also experiments with sgraffito, incising linear detailing into the paint with a pointed utensil, possibly the tip of the handle on his paintbrush. Together, these elements reveal Chagall’s indefatigable artistic curiosity, as he continued to test himself and push his painterly skills in new directions.
Against a light-filled background of vigorously impastoed, luminous colour, Tête de cheval en rouge avec couple en bleu aux fleurs features a collection of some of the most recognisable motifs from Chagall’s personal iconography. Playing with scale and perception, Chagall layers the various characters over one another in a seemingly weightless configuration, bringing them together in a dynamic composition. The body of a horse dominates the large canvas, its form surrounded by a floating bride adorned in a diaphanous white veil, and a man clutching a brimming bouquet of blossoming flowers. A rooster and other figures hover on the peripheries of this fantastical vision, appearing like figments of a dream or images from a distant memory. Each of these subjects had a deeply personal symbolism for Chagall: the bride invokes memories the artist’s great love and first wife, Bella Rosenfeld, and the man, the figure of the artist himself, presenting flowers, a symbol of romance, to his young love.
Executed in vibrant tones of orange and red, the large horse was a motif that held a potent symbolic and personal resonance for Chagall, invoking memories of his early life in Vitebsk, where horses and other farm animals were intertwined in the very fabric of the life of the town. Despite living, working and travelling in a variety of cities around the world, from St Petersburg and Berlin, to Paris and New York, his memories of his youth in Vitebsk continued to inform Chagall’s art throughout his career. ‘In my pictures,’ he explained, ‘there is not one centimetre free from nostalgia for my native land’ (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall, A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 25). More than simply a reference to Vitebsk, however, the horse came to embody a sense of freedom and escapism in the artist’s work, pictured most frequently in the magical realm of the circus. As Chagall explained in 1966, just two years after he painted the present composition, ‘All my life I have drawn horses… At the sight of horses, who are always in a state of ecstasy, I think: are they not, perhaps, happier than we? … I hear the echo of the horses’ hooves in the pit of my stomach. I could race on a horse for the first time and the last time, to the brilliant arena of life’ (‘The Circus’, 1966; quoted in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 153).
Tête de cheval en rouge avec couple en bleu aux fleurs is also a rich illustration of Chagall’s virtuosity in the realm of colour during this period of his career: from the brilliant hue of the red horse, to the complementary deep blue tones chosen to depict the couple, and the small flashes of lilac, crimson and yellow of the blooms in the bouquet, the entire canvas is bursting with a vivid play of pigment. This mastery of colour brought Chagall a new generation of enthusiastic supporters during the post-war period, his confident and bold choice of tones imbuing his work with a vital energy. Using a mixture of oil paint and tempera in the present canvas, Chagall also introduces an intriguing sense of texture to the work, contrasting the different materialities of the pigments against one another. In certain sections of the picture he also experiments with sgraffito, incising linear detailing into the paint with a pointed utensil, possibly the tip of the handle on his paintbrush. Together, these elements reveal Chagall’s indefatigable artistic curiosity, as he continued to test himself and push his painterly skills in new directions.