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拍品專文
The authenticity of this works has been confirmed by the Comité Chagall.
In August 1923, immediately after obtaining a French visa, Chagall left Berlin and reached Paris. His wife Bella and their daughter joined him some week after his arrival. For the first few months the whole family shared a damp room in the Hôtel Médical, in rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques, but early in 1924 Chagall gave up the room to Eugène Zak, in exchange for his studio at 101, avenue d'Orléans (now avenue du Général Leclerc). There Chagall lived from 1924 to 1927. This period, that Franz Meyer defined as 'the years of the avenue d'Orléans' marked an entirely new chapter in his art.
Disillusioned in the hopes he had nurtured in the Russian Revolution, he had given up the political stage for 'the real theatre, his creative imagination no less preoccupied with social problems and human life in town or country, in brightness or gloom, pursuing the narrowest interest or the most utopistic illusions' (F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 321). He turned his frustrated social concerns to a new field of artistic activity: nature. Between 1924 and 1926, the depiction of idyllic corners of the countryside became a favourite theme, and the attraction to rural motifs explained his decision to rent two rooms in the village of Montchauvet in the Ile-de-France, between the rivers Seine and Oise. Here he spent a few weeks at various times in 1925. Montchauvet was a small village in hilly country dotted with small woods, with a small church, some small houses in the only main street, and farmyards all about. Reminiscences of Vitebsk, seen thorugh the eyes of the French countryside, were inevitable.
Souvenir is one of the most complete and complex works of this intense season. Compositionally indebted to one of his masterpieces of 1915, Poet Reclining (fig. 1, Tate Modern, London), this gouache is a summation of the artist's most intimate repertoire: the recollection of his rural past; the celebration of his ancestral traditions (the killing of the ox); the self-portrait in the foreground. The landscape is the vision of the artist, asleep in the small courtyard, dreaming of Russia. Chagall's magic realism finds in Souvenir a lyrical expression: Montchauvet becomes Vitebsk - the French houses are transformed into Russian painted cabins, the light has the milky radiance of the Eastern skies, the symbolic unity between man and nature is powerfully affirmed. As Franz Meyer has commented, 'in the elementary quality of the colour itself, in the coalescence of its matter, and in the delicate blending of its fluid we sense that nature which embraces man and beast alike' (ibid., p. 343).
In August 1923, immediately after obtaining a French visa, Chagall left Berlin and reached Paris. His wife Bella and their daughter joined him some week after his arrival. For the first few months the whole family shared a damp room in the Hôtel Médical, in rue du Faubourg Saint Jacques, but early in 1924 Chagall gave up the room to Eugène Zak, in exchange for his studio at 101, avenue d'Orléans (now avenue du Général Leclerc). There Chagall lived from 1924 to 1927. This period, that Franz Meyer defined as 'the years of the avenue d'Orléans' marked an entirely new chapter in his art.
Disillusioned in the hopes he had nurtured in the Russian Revolution, he had given up the political stage for 'the real theatre, his creative imagination no less preoccupied with social problems and human life in town or country, in brightness or gloom, pursuing the narrowest interest or the most utopistic illusions' (F. Meyer, op. cit., p. 321). He turned his frustrated social concerns to a new field of artistic activity: nature. Between 1924 and 1926, the depiction of idyllic corners of the countryside became a favourite theme, and the attraction to rural motifs explained his decision to rent two rooms in the village of Montchauvet in the Ile-de-France, between the rivers Seine and Oise. Here he spent a few weeks at various times in 1925. Montchauvet was a small village in hilly country dotted with small woods, with a small church, some small houses in the only main street, and farmyards all about. Reminiscences of Vitebsk, seen thorugh the eyes of the French countryside, were inevitable.
Souvenir is one of the most complete and complex works of this intense season. Compositionally indebted to one of his masterpieces of 1915, Poet Reclining (fig. 1, Tate Modern, London), this gouache is a summation of the artist's most intimate repertoire: the recollection of his rural past; the celebration of his ancestral traditions (the killing of the ox); the self-portrait in the foreground. The landscape is the vision of the artist, asleep in the small courtyard, dreaming of Russia. Chagall's magic realism finds in Souvenir a lyrical expression: Montchauvet becomes Vitebsk - the French houses are transformed into Russian painted cabins, the light has the milky radiance of the Eastern skies, the symbolic unity between man and nature is powerfully affirmed. As Franz Meyer has commented, 'in the elementary quality of the colour itself, in the coalescence of its matter, and in the delicate blending of its fluid we sense that nature which embraces man and beast alike' (ibid., p. 343).