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Lot Essay
The Comité Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this painting.
In the introduction to the great New York retrospective of Chagall's art in 1947, James Johnson Sweeney wrote, 'Chagall is a conscious artist. While the selection and combination of his images may appear illogical from the representational viewpoint, they are carefully and rationally chosen elements for the pictorial structure he hopes to build. There is nothing automatic in his work. In fact his much talked of illogicality only appears when his paintings are read detail by detail; taken in the composite they have the same pictorial integrity as the most naturalistic painting... In an age that has fled from sentiment he has drawn constantly on it for his stimulation. And our debt to Chagall is to an artist who has brought poetry back into painting through subject matter, without any sacrifice of his painter's interest in the picture for itself, and entirely aside from any communication that can be put into words' (Chagall, New York, 1947, p. 71).
In its narrative plenitude, rich decoration and vibrant sense of movement, Le peintre et l'horloge is typical of the dynamism and energy of Chagall's later work. While the figure of the artist, clad in red, largely ignores his own magical surroundings in order to portray his own imaginary image, around his easel swirls a wealth of visual imagery from Chagall's own array of imagined characters and animals, creating an intense and intoxicating vision.
In the introduction to the great New York retrospective of Chagall's art in 1947, James Johnson Sweeney wrote, 'Chagall is a conscious artist. While the selection and combination of his images may appear illogical from the representational viewpoint, they are carefully and rationally chosen elements for the pictorial structure he hopes to build. There is nothing automatic in his work. In fact his much talked of illogicality only appears when his paintings are read detail by detail; taken in the composite they have the same pictorial integrity as the most naturalistic painting... In an age that has fled from sentiment he has drawn constantly on it for his stimulation. And our debt to Chagall is to an artist who has brought poetry back into painting through subject matter, without any sacrifice of his painter's interest in the picture for itself, and entirely aside from any communication that can be put into words' (Chagall, New York, 1947, p. 71).
In its narrative plenitude, rich decoration and vibrant sense of movement, Le peintre et l'horloge is typical of the dynamism and energy of Chagall's later work. While the figure of the artist, clad in red, largely ignores his own magical surroundings in order to portray his own imaginary image, around his easel swirls a wealth of visual imagery from Chagall's own array of imagined characters and animals, creating an intense and intoxicating vision.