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Lot Essay
Formerly in the collection of Marc Chagall’s beloved daughter, Ida, Le coq-peintre à Paris unites in a single, dreamlike image, many of the most important motifs of the artist’s career. Floating above a panoramic vision of Paris - the Seine, Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame and Sacré-Coeur all visible – the painter appears, palette in hand, half-man, half-rooster – a poetic self‑avatar that merges personal memory, creative vitality, and the dreamlike fusion of human and animal that runs through Chagall’s pictorial world. A couple drift above through the mirage-like haze of dappled blue hues, encircled by a posy of flowers.
A sense of harmony and peace radiates from this painting, qualities that reflect Chagall’s life at this time. Living and working in Provence with his wife, Valentina or ‘Vava’ Brodsky, a period of profound contentment, describing his existence as ‘a bouquet of roses’ (quoted in S. Alexander, Marc Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 492). These years were shaped not only by domestic happiness but also by the deep affection he had developed for France – a nation that had embraced him after the haunting war years, recognised his artistic genius, honoured him with major public commissions and, in 1977, awarded him the Grand‑Croix (Grand Cross) of the Légion d’honneur.
Although rooted in this late‑life serenity and in his gratitude toward the country that had become his true artistic home, memories of his early Parisian youth continued to hover in his imagination, drifting through his paintings as floating, often multipartite recollections, images, and symbols.
Chagall had arrived in the French capital for the first time in 1910. He was immersed in the heady avant-garde world of the city, his art transformed as he imbibed the stylistic and formal influences that he witnessed there. At the outbreak of the Great War, he returned to his native Russia. After spending years leading a nomadic existence and living under the hardships of Soviet life, Chagall, together with his wife Bella and their daughter Ida, finally returned to Paris in 1923. Quickly falling in with a cosmopolitan, avant-garde circle of friends – the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, critic Florent Fels, among many others – Chagall became a leading figure within the cultural milieu of the city. He signed a contract with the prestigious Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which provided him with financial security for the very first time. The next year, Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern French Painters, affirming his leadership role within the École de Paris. Speaking to his son-in-law, the art historian Franz Meyer, in the 1960s, the artist revealed that the time the family spent in the city during the 1920s and 1930s had been amongst the happiest years of his life, filled with opportunity and promise, love and joy. ‘It is a world of richness, luxury, art, the play of life,’ as Chagall once described the city to Bella (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall: Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 324).
This halcyon period was brought to an abrupt end by the onset of the Second World War, which forced Chagall to move to New York for the duration of the conflict. This upheaval was followed by the death of the artist’s beloved Bella in 1944. When he returned to Paris following the end of the war, he found in the city a familiar, uplifting, resurgent sense of inspiration. As he later remembered, ‘the Paris of which I dreamed in America and which I rediscovered enriched by new life, as if I had to be born again, dry my tears and start crying again. Absence, war, suffering were needed for all that to awaken in me and become the frame for my thoughts and my life’ (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, London, 1964, p. 529).
Paris increasingly replaced Vitebsk in the artist’s imagination as his primary, symbolic home. Discussing this shift in Chagall’s depictions of the city, Jean Cassou has written: ‘Chagall’s whole heart and his mind were involved in this theme. He projected his passionate love of Vitebsk onto Paris. He was fully aware of doing so, for he knew that he needed to be possessed by this kind of love for a place; this sanctification... was necessary to him, he needed his holy city. From now on it was to be Paris… And the monuments of Paris are themselves motifs in the life of Chagall, just as much as the donkey, the cock and the lovers’ (Chagall, London, 1965, pp. 220-225).
From this time onwards, as Le coq-peintre à Paris of 1982 shows, Paris remained a central element of his work. For Chagall, art was a record of his inner world, the canvas a receptor for his memories, passions, romances, and most importantly an expression of his identity and sense of self. The city’s landmarks are more than physical monuments but are instead key symbols of the artist’s lived experience, combined in the present work with other deeply personal imagery, all of which serves to immerse the viewer into Chagall’s unique, highly poetic and intimate artistic world.
A sense of harmony and peace radiates from this painting, qualities that reflect Chagall’s life at this time. Living and working in Provence with his wife, Valentina or ‘Vava’ Brodsky, a period of profound contentment, describing his existence as ‘a bouquet of roses’ (quoted in S. Alexander, Marc Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 492). These years were shaped not only by domestic happiness but also by the deep affection he had developed for France – a nation that had embraced him after the haunting war years, recognised his artistic genius, honoured him with major public commissions and, in 1977, awarded him the Grand‑Croix (Grand Cross) of the Légion d’honneur.
Although rooted in this late‑life serenity and in his gratitude toward the country that had become his true artistic home, memories of his early Parisian youth continued to hover in his imagination, drifting through his paintings as floating, often multipartite recollections, images, and symbols.
Chagall had arrived in the French capital for the first time in 1910. He was immersed in the heady avant-garde world of the city, his art transformed as he imbibed the stylistic and formal influences that he witnessed there. At the outbreak of the Great War, he returned to his native Russia. After spending years leading a nomadic existence and living under the hardships of Soviet life, Chagall, together with his wife Bella and their daughter Ida, finally returned to Paris in 1923. Quickly falling in with a cosmopolitan, avant-garde circle of friends – the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay, the dealer Ambroise Vollard, critic Florent Fels, among many others – Chagall became a leading figure within the cultural milieu of the city. He signed a contract with the prestigious Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, which provided him with financial security for the very first time. The next year, Maurice Raynal awarded him a place in his book Modern French Painters, affirming his leadership role within the École de Paris. Speaking to his son-in-law, the art historian Franz Meyer, in the 1960s, the artist revealed that the time the family spent in the city during the 1920s and 1930s had been amongst the happiest years of his life, filled with opportunity and promise, love and joy. ‘It is a world of richness, luxury, art, the play of life,’ as Chagall once described the city to Bella (quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall: Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 324).
This halcyon period was brought to an abrupt end by the onset of the Second World War, which forced Chagall to move to New York for the duration of the conflict. This upheaval was followed by the death of the artist’s beloved Bella in 1944. When he returned to Paris following the end of the war, he found in the city a familiar, uplifting, resurgent sense of inspiration. As he later remembered, ‘the Paris of which I dreamed in America and which I rediscovered enriched by new life, as if I had to be born again, dry my tears and start crying again. Absence, war, suffering were needed for all that to awaken in me and become the frame for my thoughts and my life’ (quoted in F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, London, 1964, p. 529).
Paris increasingly replaced Vitebsk in the artist’s imagination as his primary, symbolic home. Discussing this shift in Chagall’s depictions of the city, Jean Cassou has written: ‘Chagall’s whole heart and his mind were involved in this theme. He projected his passionate love of Vitebsk onto Paris. He was fully aware of doing so, for he knew that he needed to be possessed by this kind of love for a place; this sanctification... was necessary to him, he needed his holy city. From now on it was to be Paris… And the monuments of Paris are themselves motifs in the life of Chagall, just as much as the donkey, the cock and the lovers’ (Chagall, London, 1965, pp. 220-225).
From this time onwards, as Le coq-peintre à Paris of 1982 shows, Paris remained a central element of his work. For Chagall, art was a record of his inner world, the canvas a receptor for his memories, passions, romances, and most importantly an expression of his identity and sense of self. The city’s landmarks are more than physical monuments but are instead key symbols of the artist’s lived experience, combined in the present work with other deeply personal imagery, all of which serves to immerse the viewer into Chagall’s unique, highly poetic and intimate artistic world.