Marc Chagall: Master of Colour | Stern Pissarro Gallery by Stern Pissarro Gallery

MARC CHAGALL Master of Colour

MARC CHAGALL Master of Colour 16 J u n e – 16 J u l y 2 016

Ster n Pi ssar r o G al l er y 66 St. James’s Street, London SW1A 1NE, UK Tel: +44 (0)20 7629 6662, stern@pissarro.com

www.pissarro.net

MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985) Marc (Moyshe) Chagall was born on 6 July 1887 to poor, pious, Yiddish-speaking parents living on the outskirts of the Belarusian town of Vitebsk. Although the latter was by no means the small shtetl conjured up by his paintings, the notion of being an artist was an alien – and indeed blasphemous – one to most people in his immediate Hasidic Jewish environment. His mother, however, was supportive of his ambitions, and in 1906 arranged for him to attend the art school run by Jewish artist Yehuda Pen. In the winter of 1906-7, he managed to move to St.Petersburg, where he attended a succession of art schools, none of them very congenial. In 1908, he became a student at the Zvantseva School, where one of his teachers was Léon Bakst (né Lev Rosenberg) and where for the first time, as he put it in his autobiography My Life, he encountered “a breath of Europe”. In May 1911 he finally achieved his ambition of moving to Paris. Here he would produce a stream of utterly original works, fusing avant-garde styles (notably Fauvism and above all, Cubism) with iconography drawn from the world of his childhood. In 1914 he was offered his first one-man show, in Berlin. Travelling there for the opening, he decided to continue eastwards to Vitebsk, where he was caught by the outbreak of the First World War. Marrying his longstanding girlfriend Bella (née Berta) Rosenfeld in 1915, his daughter Ida was born the following year. Caught up in the fervour of the Russian Revolution of 1917, he became

Commissar for Art for the Province of Vitebsk. In 1920, his position no longer tenable, he moved to Moscow, where he produced his magnificent murals for the State Yiddish Chamber Theatre. In 1922, with civil war and famine still raging, and the promise of artistic freedom unfulfilled, Chagall left Russia with his wife and daughter for Berlin where, under the tutelage of Joseph Budko and Hermann Struck, he quickly mastered the art of printmaking. Returning to Paris in 1923, the twenties were a far less turbulent decade, and for the first time he began to produce landscapes and still lifes, suffused with his own brand of humour, fantasy and romance. With the rise of Fascism, his vision darkened; and in 1941 he fled to the safety of the United States, all too aware of the likely fate of his family in Vitebsk. Although 1944 saw the sudden death of his beloved Bella, he soon started a new relationship with Virginia Haggard McNeil; their son David was born in 1946. Returning to France for good in 1948, he soon settled on the CĂ´te dâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Azur, staying with TĂŠriade at his Villa Natacha in SaintJean-Cap-Ferrat before moving to Vence, and then (from 1966 onwards) to Saint-Paul-de-Vence. His relationship with Virginia ended in 1952, and he married Valentina (Vava) Brodsky in the same year. Experimenting in the post-war period with an evergreater range of media, Chagall died on 28 March 1985, at the age of ninety-seven, working almost until the end.

Étude pour la Nuit de Vence Oil and Indian ink on canvas-board 28.4 × 34.8 cm (113⁄16 × 1311⁄16 inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower left Executed circa 1952-56

Provenance Collection of the artist Timothy Yarger Fine Art, Beverly Hills, California This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 25 April 2012.

Les Fiancés sur Fond Rouge Oil on canvas 54.5 × 65 cm (211⁄2 × 255⁄8 inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower left Executed 1976

Provenance Collection of David McNeil, the artist’s son Corporate collection, Japan

Exhibition Tokyo, Taimei Gallery, Marc Chagall, 1987 This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 13 December 2002.

Fleurs dans un Vase Bleu Gouache and watercolour on paper 68.3 × 52.7 cm (267⁄8 × 20¾ inches) Signed lower right, Chagall Marc Executed 1936

Provenance Marcel Mabille, Brussels (in 1947) Private collection, Europe (acquired by the family in 1957) Thence by descent

Exhibition Brussels, Galerie Georges Giroux, Exposition d’Art Français Contemporain, February 1947 Charleroi, Salon des Beaux Arts, Rétrospective Tytgat et Dufy, March-April 1957 This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 28 January 2015.

Le Violoniste du Mariage Indian ink, gouache and pastel on paper 58 × 75.5 cm (227⁄8 × 29¾ inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower right Executed circa 1975

Provenance Private collection, Paris This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 10 July 2015.

Libération Oil on canvas 61 × 36.3 cm (24 × 14½ inches) Signed lower right, Marc Chagall Executed between 1937- 45

Provenance Private collection, London This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 12 May 1989. The origins of this image lie in a large canvas of 1937 entitled The Revolution (which now exists only as smaller, albeit complete study in the Pompidou Centre, Paris). In the late 1940s, Chagall - clearly uneasy at the political explicitness of its iconography - decided to cut it into three sections and radically rework it as three separate compositions: from left to right, Résistance, Résurrection (in both of these, a Jewish Jesus figure features prominently) and (most joyful and affirmative) Libération – to which the present, much smaller work is clearly related. All three canvases belong to the Pompidou Centre.

La Robe Rouge Gouache and pastel on paper 90.5 × 61.9 cm (35 × 243⁄8 inches) Signed lower right, Marc Chagall Executed 1971

Provenance Pierre Matisse, New York Private collection, London This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall.

L’Attente Oil on canvas-board 46 × 38 cm (18 × 15 inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower right Executed circa 1975-78

Provenance Private collection, Paris This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 15 April 1996.

Les Mariés à l’Âne Vert Oil, brush and ink on canvas 41× 27 cm (161⁄8 × 105⁄8 inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower right Executed 1967

Provenance Estate of the artist Sale: Galerie Kornfeld, Bern, June 15, 2007, lot 13 Private collection, Switzerland (acquired at the above sale) Private collection, Long Island, New York

Exhibited Osaka, Takashimaya Art Gallery; Kyoto, Takashimaya Art Gallery; Yokohama, Takashimaya Art Gallery; Tokyo, Takashimaya Art Gallery; Okayama, Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art & Gifu, Museum of Fine Arts, Marc Chagall, La Réminiscence de l’amour, 2012, no. 50, illustrated in colour in the catalogue The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Chagall.

Brides and grooms repeatedly appear in Chagall’s art throughout the span of his eighty-year career. Seemingly enchanted by the symbolic interlocking of two souls in matrimony, the artist’s happy marriage to his childhood sweetheart Bella, ending only with her death in 1944, compounded his fascination with the subject. The presence of a bride in a white gown in the present 1967 composition is a poignant evocation of his happy relationship in a powerful composition which succeeds as a touching ode to young love. The couple hover beneath familiar elements of Chagall’s visual vocabulary: a floating acrobat, a green donkey and a candelabra. The deep, cavernous-blue of the background is enlivened by the rich splashes of purple, green, yellow, white and red. The symbol of the green donkey appears in Chagall’s 1911 composition L’Âne Vert in the collection of the Tate Modern, London, also set against a deep blue background. The style of L’Âne Vert is naïve but the imagery coheres neatly with the artist’s subsequent preoccupation with his Russian heritage and Jewish ancestry as two peasants take charge of their pack animal. The candelabra further heightens the artist’s nostalgic allusion to his Jewish hometown.

L’Offrande Ink wash and Indian ink on paper 60.1 × 45.5 cm (235⁄8 × 177⁄8 inches) Signed lower left, Marc Chagall Executed 1966

Provenance Galerie Rosengart, Lucerne (acquired from the artist, 1967) William Findlay, Chicago Sotheby's, New York, 12 November 1988 Galerie Tamenaga, Osaka Private collection, acquired from the above 1989

Exhibition Lucern, Galerie Rosengart, Chagall, Coloured Wash-Drawings, 1967, no. 24 (illustrated) Basel, Galerie Beyeler, Picasso, Werke von 1932-1965, February-April 1967, no. 43 (illustrated) This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 9 July 2012.

La Mariée sur Fond Rose Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard 30 × 23.9 cm (113⁄4 × 9 3⁄8 inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower left Executed circa 1966 Both in its iconography and roseate colour scheme, this work has clear affinities with the Song of Songs cycle housed in the Museum of the Biblical Message, Nice.

Provenance Collection of Ida Chagall, the artist's daughter, Paris Private collection, Europe This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 15 April 2015.

“The Greatest Source of Poetry of All Time” Marc Chagall and the Bible

Born in 1887 into a poor but fervent Hasidic Jewish family living in Vitebsk in the Russian Pale of Settlement, the Old Testament formed an intimate and integral part of Marc Chagall’s upbringing. Although he early on ceased to be an observant Jew, its continuing influence on him during a career that spanned eight decades is borne out not only by his many paintings and prints on Biblical themes but by ample written testimony, poems as well as prose. Unburdened by a Christian sense of original sin, Chagall’s vision of the Old Testament, even when expressed on a small-scale, was of a grand human narrative of epic proportions, dominated by lofty emotions – be they tragic, ecstatic or even, occasionally, mixed with humour. As the artist himself put it: “I went to the great universal book, the Bible. Since my childhood it has filled me with visions about the fate of the world and inspired me in my work. In moments of doubt, its highly poetic grandeur and wisdom have comforted me like a second nature”. Although the Bible thus underpins a great number of Chagall’s early paintings, the first occasion on which he worked on Biblical themes in an explicit and concerted fashion was in the early 1930s, when the French art dealer Ambroise Vollard asked him to produce a series of etchings to illustrate the Old Testament. It was this commission that prompted him to visit Palestine for the first time (as well as Egypt and Syria), in order to envisage a physical context for his images. Although this 1931 visit undoubtedly had a strong emotional impact on Chagall, the paintings he produced in response to it were atypically naturalistic, and the land and its

Cover of the 1956 Verve publication

people ultimately had little direct influence on his vision of the Old Testament. “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it”, he once declared. Chagall started by creating small but powerful gouaches, in subtle, deep and closely-related hues, which he then transposed to the monochrome print medium. Work on the series was interrupted in 1939 by Vollard’s sudden death in a car accident and by the outbreak of the Second World War, resuming only in 1952, four years after the artist’s return to France from wartime exile in

the United States. The entire series of 105 etchings was finally published in 1956, under the title La Bible – supplemented by sixteen strongly coloured and twelve black and white vigorous new lithographs plus a cover and title page – by the Greek-born art critic turned publisher Tériade (born Stratis Eleftheriades), whom Chagall had first met in 1923. Produced in the form of a two volume limited edition “livre d’artiste” as well as a double issue of Verve (Vol.VIII, No.33/34), the influential magazine founded by Tériade in 1937, in both a French and an English edition, it included an introduction by American art critic Meyer Schapiro and poems by French philosopher Jean Wahl. A number of the fine preliminary studies for these lithographs – Moïse, Salomon, David et Absalon, Elie Enlevé au Ciel and David à la Harpe (which graced the cover) – feature in the current exhibition. In the late 1950s, Tériade, keen to build on the success of the earlier Bible project, commissioned Chagall to produce another series of Biblical images, specifically requesting that he tackle subjects not covered in the 1956 publication. The artist duly embarked on a new series of Old Testament illustrations, this time in the form of mixed media works on paper (a combination of gouache, ink and wash, pencil, pastel and Conté crayon) transposed into forty-eight lithographs (25 colour and 23 black and white), in which the rich textures, hieratic intensity and gravitas of the earlier series were replaced by a fluent linearity and lifeaffirming exuberance. The lighter mood of most of these images must be due in part to the optimism of the post-war period, linked no doubt to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 – in stark contrast to the dark political backdrop of the 1930s etchings. Published in 1960 as another double issue of Verve (Vol.X, No.37/38), again both in French and English, with an introduction by the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, this was entitled Dessins pour la Bible. It is to this publication that most of the hitherto rarely

seen Biblical images in the current exhibition relate. Lithography, which lends itself more readily than etching to a dynamic transposition of freely-drawn motifs, would thereafter become the artist’s preferred graphic medium. It was in the mid-1950s that Chagall also embarked on a series of monumental canvases on themes taken from the Old Testament Books of Genesis and Exodus (many with strong visual links to the Biblical prints of the same period) and a separate series inspired by the Song of Songs, as well as works in other media (tapestry, mosaic, stained glass, ceramic and stone). These works – the personal donation of the artist – are on permanent display at the wonderful custom-built Museum of the Biblical Message in Nice, which opened to the public in the early 1970s.

Cover of the 1960 Verve publication

For all Marc Chagall’s publically-avowed universalist ideals (as well as his – necessarily controversial – incorporation of a Jewish Jesus figure into many of his Old Testament images), his roots remain firmly embedded in the pre-Holocaust Jewish traditions of Russia and Eastern Europe. Paradoxically, it may well be this rootedness, this sense of a rich, now largely lost tradition out of which an intensely personal, even idiosyncratic, vision can emerge, that lends this artist’s work on Biblical themes such enduring appeal. Monica Bohm-Duchen May 2016

Le Roi Balthasar Regarde la Main qui Écrit Ink wash, pastel, Indian ink and pencil on paper 35.7 × 26.9 cm (14¾ × 105⁄8 inches) Signed with Estate stamp lower right Executed 1958-59 This was a preliminary work for Plate 74, for the 1960 Verve Bible publication.