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Lot Essay
“Paris, my heart's reflection: I would like to blend with it, not to be alone with myself.”
—Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall painted the present work as part of his “Paris Series,” a group of more than thirty works he conceived in February 1952 and executed over the course of the following two years. Chagall based many of these views on drawings he made wondering around Paris, a city he’d known since he was a young man; he also returned to pastels he had made while on a three-month sojourn in Paris during the spring of 1946, the first of several visits he made to France as he considered relocating from America, where he had spent his wartime exile. Following his permanent return in 1948, Chagall eventually settled in Saint Paul de Vence, a town in the Midi. He continued to use his daughter Ida's home in Paris as a base and was a frequent visitor to the capital for exhibitions and other activities.
The views in Chagall’s “Paris Series,” as Franz Meyer has written, “blend under a magic veil of color with the dance of lovers and fabulous creatures” (Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 530). In these works, the artist evoked well-known sites of the capital, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille, the Place de la Concorde, St-Germain-des-Prés or Notre Dame, amongst others. This endeavor “demonstrated a new ambition, scale and consistency of vision that had been absent from his work in the decade following Bella's death” (J. Wullschlager, Chagall, A Biography, New York, 2008, p. 483).
In the present painting, the Carrousel du Louvre is draped in an evening light, covered in dark green and blue hues. A rising sun and an arresting yellow sky brighten the composition at upper left. Floating above the museum’s gardens, three nude women—possibly The Three Graces—stand within a sunflower-like form. In the lower right corner, the artist himself is represented in a trench coat, palette and paint brunch in hand. A woman in a long dress—either his late wife and great love Bella Rosenfeld, his new bride Valentina (“Vava”) Brodsky, or an amalgamation of both—is perched besides him, shielding him from the rest of the composition. The love and care of these women was an ever-recurring theme throughout Chagall’s oeuvre, always richly imbued with personal narratives. Here, the lovers are evoked again in the upper left corner, floating upside down in embrace by the fiery sun.
—Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall painted the present work as part of his “Paris Series,” a group of more than thirty works he conceived in February 1952 and executed over the course of the following two years. Chagall based many of these views on drawings he made wondering around Paris, a city he’d known since he was a young man; he also returned to pastels he had made while on a three-month sojourn in Paris during the spring of 1946, the first of several visits he made to France as he considered relocating from America, where he had spent his wartime exile. Following his permanent return in 1948, Chagall eventually settled in Saint Paul de Vence, a town in the Midi. He continued to use his daughter Ida's home in Paris as a base and was a frequent visitor to the capital for exhibitions and other activities.
The views in Chagall’s “Paris Series,” as Franz Meyer has written, “blend under a magic veil of color with the dance of lovers and fabulous creatures” (Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 530). In these works, the artist evoked well-known sites of the capital, such as the Eiffel Tower, the Bastille, the Place de la Concorde, St-Germain-des-Prés or Notre Dame, amongst others. This endeavor “demonstrated a new ambition, scale and consistency of vision that had been absent from his work in the decade following Bella's death” (J. Wullschlager, Chagall, A Biography, New York, 2008, p. 483).
In the present painting, the Carrousel du Louvre is draped in an evening light, covered in dark green and blue hues. A rising sun and an arresting yellow sky brighten the composition at upper left. Floating above the museum’s gardens, three nude women—possibly The Three Graces—stand within a sunflower-like form. In the lower right corner, the artist himself is represented in a trench coat, palette and paint brunch in hand. A woman in a long dress—either his late wife and great love Bella Rosenfeld, his new bride Valentina (“Vava”) Brodsky, or an amalgamation of both—is perched besides him, shielding him from the rest of the composition. The love and care of these women was an ever-recurring theme throughout Chagall’s oeuvre, always richly imbued with personal narratives. Here, the lovers are evoked again in the upper left corner, floating upside down in embrace by the fiery sun.