Marc Chagall
(French/Russian, 1887–1985)
Les Amoureux à la Fenêtre
, 1981
watercolor, pastel, pen and India ink and wash on paper
stamped with signature Marc Chagall (lower right)
13 3/4 x 10 3/8 inches.
The authenticity of this lot has previously been confirmed by the Comité Chagall and is accompanied by a photo-certificate issued by the Comité and dated October 11, 2007.
Provenance:
Private Collection, Japan, by 1986
Acquired from the above
Sold: Christie's, London, June 25, 2008, Lot 250
Acquired at the above sale
Lot note:
By the time of his death in 1985, the name of Marc Chagall had become synonymous with modern art. Born in present-day Belarus, the self-taught artist emigrated to Paris from Vitebsk in 1910. There, confronted with the clamor of modernity and community shared with names like Picasso and Apollinaire, Chagall began a career that fused memory, emotion, and spirituality into paint. He would stay in France for the remainder of his life, only interrupted by a period in the United States between 1941 and 1948 to escape Nazi persecution. It is striking, following the progression of his career, the persistence of his themes and images – some based on his rural upbringing in Russia and others on his religious reflections. The images of the rooster and the cow, and especially the images of the floating lovers, have their origins in the artist’s earliest works of his Vitebsk period. (James Johnson Sweeney, interview with Chagall, 1944)
Les amoureux à la fenêtre is a touching and resonant example of this mixture of memory, fantasy, and yearning. In the present drawing, a man in a purple sweater caresses a nude woman, their foreheads leaning into one another in a moment of intimacy and tenderness. She wears nothing save for a necklace, the pearls uniting with the ringlets of hair cascading down her neck. Above them, the window emphasizes the viewer as voyeur into this erotic display, even as the viewer is displaced from the window itself. Around them a host of diminutive figures, some real and some imagined, unite passion with music: a fiddler in green plays a song of love, an angel descends from above, and a cow and two roosters, among Chagall’s favorite animals, join in the dance. Two other nude women appear in the drawing, one contained within the sleeve of the man, another looking on from over the man’s collar – each obscuring the identity of the subject of the man’s affection.
Given his meditations on memory and faith, Chagall’s images of youthful lovers and newlyweds are religious as well as autobiographical. The sexuality displayed here harkens to erotic passages from the Song of Solomon, which can be read literally as impassioned love songs or allegorically as expressions of faith. But in 1981, Chagall was in his mid-nineties – he had known and lost love. His first wife, Bella Rosenfeld, had been his companion since he began his career in Vitebsk. His great early paintings of lovers, embraced and floating in the sky, had each been a valentine to her. After Bella’s sudden death in 1944, Chagall remained a widower until 1952 when his daughter Ida introduced him to Valentina “Vava” Brodsky. The two soon married. Does this drawing then show the romance of this new union? Does the youth of the couple indicate a memory of Bella rather than his second marriage in older age? Do the other nude figures personify past loves? In his reminiscence, and self-awareness at this late stage in life, the ambiguity is surely purposeful.
