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拍品专文
Début d'hiver russe is a rare gouache from a 1911-1912, a decisive period in Marc Chagall’s early career. Just two years prior, the young artist first arrived to Paris from his native Vitebsk. Despite his infatuation with the dazzling spectacle of the metropolis, the small village of his youth would never stray far from his mind, nor yield it’s importance within his work. As in the present gouache, Vitebsk would feature in a multitude of surreal, dreamlike scenes imbued with nostalgia and produced over the course of a remarkably prolific career. Such works from this transformative period provide a glimpse into the synthesis of Chagall’s earlier interest in folkloric subject matter with a new type of stylistic innovation informed by the radical reassessment of form and color he observed in the work of the Cubists and Fauves at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910.
Upon arriving to Paris, Chagall took a studio in the legendary building known as La Rûche (the ‘bee-hive’) in bohemian Montparnasse, home to many of the most innovative painters of the day including Chaïm Soutine, Alexander Archipenko, Amedeo Modigliani, Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger. It was during this time that the young painter found the means to fully articulate his wholly unique form of painterly expression, one that rejected naturalism in favor of producing oneiric narratives imbued with fantastical motifs.
Despite his enthusiasm for the bustle of the French capital, Chagall turned his increasingly innovative eye to the quotidian life he left behind, filling his work with the rituals and routines that dominated life in Vitebsk and the characters whose stories played out amongst its winding streets. The town is instantly recognizable in the present work, its distinct rustic character evoked in vibrant colors which illuminate an otherwise cold winter scene, as the dome of its iconic orthodox church rises proudly from the background. Although he would leave for a final time in 1922, never to return, the place and his sentimental reminiscence of it never faded. Works such as Début d'hiver russe portend later scenes rich with whimsical longing for his homeland, articulated through an emblematic visual language uniquely his own.
Upon arriving to Paris, Chagall took a studio in the legendary building known as La Rûche (the ‘bee-hive’) in bohemian Montparnasse, home to many of the most innovative painters of the day including Chaïm Soutine, Alexander Archipenko, Amedeo Modigliani, Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger. It was during this time that the young painter found the means to fully articulate his wholly unique form of painterly expression, one that rejected naturalism in favor of producing oneiric narratives imbued with fantastical motifs.
Despite his enthusiasm for the bustle of the French capital, Chagall turned his increasingly innovative eye to the quotidian life he left behind, filling his work with the rituals and routines that dominated life in Vitebsk and the characters whose stories played out amongst its winding streets. The town is instantly recognizable in the present work, its distinct rustic character evoked in vibrant colors which illuminate an otherwise cold winter scene, as the dome of its iconic orthodox church rises proudly from the background. Although he would leave for a final time in 1922, never to return, the place and his sentimental reminiscence of it never faded. Works such as Début d'hiver russe portend later scenes rich with whimsical longing for his homeland, articulated through an emblematic visual language uniquely his own.