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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Comité Marc Chagall.
The juxtaposition of a young woman and an animal-headed human has been one of Chagall's main motifs since 1911, and recurs frequently in his circus gouaches from 1937 onwards. The present lot is a prime example of this subject, where Chagall places a giant hybrid goat or donkey-man at the centre of a circus stage, with a small female figure seated on his shoulder, similar as that seen in Chagall's Springtime watercolour in the Sao Paolo Museum of Art. Holding two major Chagallesque attributes, that of the violin and a bouquet of flowers, this figure takes up most of the surface of the drawing and the stage, whilst a horse-rider performs her moves in the far lower left quadrant.
The hybrid half-man, half-animal figure recalls Egyptian hieroglyphs and derives from an old tradition extensively discussed by Zofia Ameisenowa in her article, 'Animal-headed Gods, Evangelists, Saints and Righteous Men'(Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, vol. 12, London, 1949, pp. 21-45). Ameisenowa refers to a group of Jewish prayer books and manuscripts from the 13th and 14th centuries, in which the characters from the Holy Scripture are represented as figures with animals' heads. Chagall's Hassidic education in Vitebsk left a strong impact throughout his entire œuvre, and these Judaic texts mentioned by Ameisenowa, in which he could find certain sources for his own artistic vocabulary, may have been familiar to him.
Animals are so prevalent in Chagall's masterpieces, revealing his profound meditation on the boundaries between the human and the animal worlds. Chagall's animals seldom stand for allegories of happiness, love or pain, they are above all protagonists and act as humans. In the Chagallesque world, the Russian artist subverts conventional mythology in order to create his own myth. In this way, humans can have allegorical connotations whereas animals are simply what they are in the scene. Therefore, the goat or bull in the present lot is a clown capable of dreaming and being a musician on stage, just as the bird is in Chagall's Juggler, 1943 (fig. 1). It can also be a dancer or an acrobat, starring in Chagall's La Danse of 1950 (M P513), or it plays the role of a groom, such as in Chagall's well-known painting of 1939, Midsummer Night's Dream (M P427). Chagall's animals triumph in his universe, to the extent that they can even be a threat to humanity, as suggested in his painting of 1964-1966, La guerre (Zurich, Kunsthaus), where a giant white goat dominates a scene of terrorised families fleeing from their ravaged homes.
The juxtaposition of a young woman and an animal-headed human has been one of Chagall's main motifs since 1911, and recurs frequently in his circus gouaches from 1937 onwards. The present lot is a prime example of this subject, where Chagall places a giant hybrid goat or donkey-man at the centre of a circus stage, with a small female figure seated on his shoulder, similar as that seen in Chagall's Springtime watercolour in the Sao Paolo Museum of Art. Holding two major Chagallesque attributes, that of the violin and a bouquet of flowers, this figure takes up most of the surface of the drawing and the stage, whilst a horse-rider performs her moves in the far lower left quadrant.
The hybrid half-man, half-animal figure recalls Egyptian hieroglyphs and derives from an old tradition extensively discussed by Zofia Ameisenowa in her article, 'Animal-headed Gods, Evangelists, Saints and Righteous Men'(Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, vol. 12, London, 1949, pp. 21-45). Ameisenowa refers to a group of Jewish prayer books and manuscripts from the 13th and 14th centuries, in which the characters from the Holy Scripture are represented as figures with animals' heads. Chagall's Hassidic education in Vitebsk left a strong impact throughout his entire œuvre, and these Judaic texts mentioned by Ameisenowa, in which he could find certain sources for his own artistic vocabulary, may have been familiar to him.
Animals are so prevalent in Chagall's masterpieces, revealing his profound meditation on the boundaries between the human and the animal worlds. Chagall's animals seldom stand for allegories of happiness, love or pain, they are above all protagonists and act as humans. In the Chagallesque world, the Russian artist subverts conventional mythology in order to create his own myth. In this way, humans can have allegorical connotations whereas animals are simply what they are in the scene. Therefore, the goat or bull in the present lot is a clown capable of dreaming and being a musician on stage, just as the bird is in Chagall's Juggler, 1943 (fig. 1). It can also be a dancer or an acrobat, starring in Chagall's La Danse of 1950 (M P513), or it plays the role of a groom, such as in Chagall's well-known painting of 1939, Midsummer Night's Dream (M P427). Chagall's animals triumph in his universe, to the extent that they can even be a threat to humanity, as suggested in his painting of 1964-1966, La guerre (Zurich, Kunsthaus), where a giant white goat dominates a scene of terrorised families fleeing from their ravaged homes.