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拍品專文
The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
Chagall's experience and memories of the circus lay at the heart of his personal mythology, and had been an important subject for the artist since his Russian and early Paris years. In the late 1920s, as he was finishing his series of gouaches based on the fables of La Fontaine, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, its sponsor, suggested that the artist undertake a second group, this time on the theme of the circus. Chagall painted nineteen gouaches, many of which were based on sketches that he made in Vollard's box at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris. The variety of characters and poses in these works provided elements to which the artist returned on many occasions over the course of his career.
Chagall's circus pictures are almost all filled with brilliant color and exuberant activity, and stand out among his subjects as being especially joyous and life-affirming. Nevertheless, the artist's experience of the circus was introspective and tinged with melancholy, as he reminisced in 1967:
For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound...
These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colors and make-up, I can dream of painting new psychic distortions...
It is a magic word, circus, a timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of a great art...
I would like to go up to that bareback rider who has just reappeared, smiling; her dress, a bouquet of flowers. I would circle her with my flowered and unflowered years. On my knees, I would tell her wishes and dreams, not of this world. I would run after her to ask her how to live, how to escape from
myself, from the world, whom to run to, where to go...
I have always thought of clowns, acrobats and actors as tragically human beings who, for me, are like characters in certain religious paintings.
(from "The Circus," in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, pp. 196-198)
Chagall's fascination with the circus places him in a long line of Impressionist and modern painters (see note to lot 291 to compare the role of the circus in the work of Georges Rouault). In 1968 the poet Louis Aragon assessed Chagall's contribution to this genre, revealing unexpected elements of eroticism and danger:
There are many painters of the circus: Seurat, Lautrec, Rouault, Léger. I should like some day to see their canvases alongside of Chagall's... One would preceive with a certain surprise that perhaps only in Chagall do all the senses play a prominent role, and that for him the smell of the horse and of the woman, amid the glitter of the ring, is as disturbing as the brilliant light and the spectators in the gallery are for us... In the Chagallian circuses, indeed what makes them incomparable is that we are caught up in the movement of the woman circling the ring, she whose beauty is the beauty of danger, waiting for her to come around again, until all the men watching with bated breath reach the point of being jealous of the horse.
(from "Chagall's Circus", in ibid., pp. 195-196)
Chagall's experience and memories of the circus lay at the heart of his personal mythology, and had been an important subject for the artist since his Russian and early Paris years. In the late 1920s, as he was finishing his series of gouaches based on the fables of La Fontaine, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, its sponsor, suggested that the artist undertake a second group, this time on the theme of the circus. Chagall painted nineteen gouaches, many of which were based on sketches that he made in Vollard's box at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris. The variety of characters and poses in these works provided elements to which the artist returned on many occasions over the course of his career.
Chagall's circus pictures are almost all filled with brilliant color and exuberant activity, and stand out among his subjects as being especially joyous and life-affirming. Nevertheless, the artist's experience of the circus was introspective and tinged with melancholy, as he reminisced in 1967:
For me a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. A circus is disturbing. It is profound...
These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move toward new horizons. Lured by their colors and make-up, I can dream of painting new psychic distortions...
It is a magic word, circus, a timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of a great art...
I would like to go up to that bareback rider who has just reappeared, smiling; her dress, a bouquet of flowers. I would circle her with my flowered and unflowered years. On my knees, I would tell her wishes and dreams, not of this world. I would run after her to ask her how to live, how to escape from
myself, from the world, whom to run to, where to go...
I have always thought of clowns, acrobats and actors as tragically human beings who, for me, are like characters in certain religious paintings.
(from "The Circus," in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, pp. 196-198)
Chagall's fascination with the circus places him in a long line of Impressionist and modern painters (see note to lot 291 to compare the role of the circus in the work of Georges Rouault). In 1968 the poet Louis Aragon assessed Chagall's contribution to this genre, revealing unexpected elements of eroticism and danger:
There are many painters of the circus: Seurat, Lautrec, Rouault, Léger. I should like some day to see their canvases alongside of Chagall's... One would preceive with a certain surprise that perhaps only in Chagall do all the senses play a prominent role, and that for him the smell of the horse and of the woman, amid the glitter of the ring, is as disturbing as the brilliant light and the spectators in the gallery are for us... In the Chagallian circuses, indeed what makes them incomparable is that we are caught up in the movement of the woman circling the ring, she whose beauty is the beauty of danger, waiting for her to come around again, until all the men watching with bated breath reach the point of being jealous of the horse.
(from "Chagall's Circus", in ibid., pp. 195-196)