Animal fabuleux: Fabel-Tier

Undoubtedly inspired by the commission received from celebrated art dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard in 1926 to illustrate an edition of La Fontaine’s fables, in Animal fabuleux: Fabel-Tier, Marc Chagall conjures a mythical creature, drawing on the artist’s rich repertoire of animal themes and motifs. Enchanted by the folklore and the religion assimilated over the course of his charmed childhood, Chagall exercises his boundless imagination to embellish the present lot with phantasmal inventiveness.
In dazzling, liberally applied colour, a bovine creature rears up in profile, thrusting across the scene from left to right, with a cloven hoof raised to bear a tiny, delicately drawn nude female figure recumbent on a bed. She appears as if just plucked from a doll’s house: a miniature Olympia or Venus of Urbino, delicately poised. The yellow bed frame, reminiscent of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom and the white pillow and bedding are picked out with masterly confidence and draw attention to the playful incongruity of scale between the figures.

The gargantuan creature, meanwhile, is yoked as a beast of burden, perhaps to draw an unseen plough. Harnessed for toil— it is tractable but also willing and able to offer more than was asked of it. Cows and oxen often appear in Chagall’s work and represent nostalgic memories of his rural early years in Vitebsk, suggested here too by the delicately rendered village scenes in the background. These stand for the animals who serve mankind and who provide nourishment, as denoted by the depiction of the creature’s udders. The hindquarters of the beast, however, are left to our imagination, as if in execution of a surrealist cadavre exquis.

The flecks of turquoise in the upper left may represent the stars while those of white and sienna at bottom right, the stones and soil of the earth. This is land that is warm, its cadmium reds and oranges inviting, although the beast’s standing leg appears to have forced an impression upon it. It is not clear which of the depicted front legs is which, further emphasising the oneiric quality of the piece. Chagall himself resisted the idea that specific motifs in his works were like ciphers to be logically decoded; however, the delicately rendered nude must surely symbolise delight or ravishment, the rhapsody of earthly pleasure.

Chagall’s affinity for animals, his fondness for their genuineness, his amusement at their character and behaviour and his recognition of their service, is well-attested— not least by their repeated and respected appearances throughout his oeuvre. This appeal is also acknowledged by collectors: Tête de vache (1926) for example, is an affectionate depiction of a cow from the same period as the present work, and was sold by Christie’s London in March 2022 for £1.4m.

It is also the energy and potency of animals, both real and imagined, that was a recurring theme in Chagall’s art. In a later work, La Bastille, a beast (or its spirit), again emerges from the left and is rendered in red to emphasise its animality while its stuck-out tongue suggests its playful irreverence.

Chagall was captivated by the beasts of the field, seeing through their superficial domestication to perceive in them something elemental. The present lot is an outstanding example of his abiding appreciation for them— it affirms his perception of their emblematic dominion and his reverence for their metaphysical grace.