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Lot Essay
This work is sold with a photo-certificate from the Comité Marc Chagall.
In Fête autour du grand bouquet, Chagall's flower bouquet blooms with its scintillating touches of bright colours in the middle of a group of Chagallian characters. As often as is the case in Chagall's world, the artist subverts the traditional passive role of flowers being a gift, as they become here the focus of attention. Invading most of the work's surface, the flowers are venerated by the various crowds of people, comprising of a loving couple, an angel, a yellow cow, several men with books, a father and his child - a mix of real characters derived from Chagall's past and from Chagall's oneiric world.
One of the artist's works dating from the last years of his life, Chagall's invention of the theme and the composition of Fête autour du grand bouquet nonetheless finds its inspirational sources back in his childhood, in the Belarusian village of Vitebsk. Some of his favorite themes of his early years included wise old Jews playing the violin or Jewish festivities celebrated with his family, yet his most ambitious compositions of that time are scenes of Jewish rituals, such as his two nuptial paintings both entitled The Wedding, one of 1909 (Zurich, Foundation E.G. Bührle; M P78), the second of 1911 (Paris, Musée national d'art moderne). The sense of a festive community and its religious connotations is once again subtly explored by Chagall in the present lot, yet the artist goes further, as it is not obvious what the occasion is or why people are celebrating the flower bouquet.
Chagall departs from the usual decorative convention of flowers simply being a character's attribute, and instead, he establishes them as the main protagonists of the scene. In terms of composition, Fête autour du grand bouquet is close to Chagall's painting The Dance to Happiness of circa 1957 (Mrs. Hilde W. Gerst Collection; fig. 1), in which a female dancer takes up the role of the flowers, as people and animals swirl around her. It would seem then, that the present flower drawing is a celebration of joy, love and nature's beauty, an ode to Chagall's mythical world where the laws of nature can be distorted.
In Fête autour du grand bouquet, Chagall's flower bouquet blooms with its scintillating touches of bright colours in the middle of a group of Chagallian characters. As often as is the case in Chagall's world, the artist subverts the traditional passive role of flowers being a gift, as they become here the focus of attention. Invading most of the work's surface, the flowers are venerated by the various crowds of people, comprising of a loving couple, an angel, a yellow cow, several men with books, a father and his child - a mix of real characters derived from Chagall's past and from Chagall's oneiric world.
One of the artist's works dating from the last years of his life, Chagall's invention of the theme and the composition of Fête autour du grand bouquet nonetheless finds its inspirational sources back in his childhood, in the Belarusian village of Vitebsk. Some of his favorite themes of his early years included wise old Jews playing the violin or Jewish festivities celebrated with his family, yet his most ambitious compositions of that time are scenes of Jewish rituals, such as his two nuptial paintings both entitled The Wedding, one of 1909 (Zurich, Foundation E.G. Bührle; M P78), the second of 1911 (Paris, Musée national d'art moderne). The sense of a festive community and its religious connotations is once again subtly explored by Chagall in the present lot, yet the artist goes further, as it is not obvious what the occasion is or why people are celebrating the flower bouquet.
Chagall departs from the usual decorative convention of flowers simply being a character's attribute, and instead, he establishes them as the main protagonists of the scene. In terms of composition, Fête autour du grand bouquet is close to Chagall's painting The Dance to Happiness of circa 1957 (Mrs. Hilde W. Gerst Collection; fig. 1), in which a female dancer takes up the role of the flowers, as people and animals swirl around her. It would seem then, that the present flower drawing is a celebration of joy, love and nature's beauty, an ode to Chagall's mythical world where the laws of nature can be distorted.