Lot 48 : f - MARC CHAGALL
Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2006
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Description:
PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE SIDNEY E. FRANK
1887-1985
LES AMIS
measurements
116 by 80cm.
alternate measurements
45 5/8 by 31 1/2 in.
Painted in 1968-71.
signed Marc Chagall (lower right); signed Marc Chagall on the reverse
oil on canvas
The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Chagall.
PROVENANCE
Galerie Maeght, Paris
Acquired from the above by the previous owner (sale: Sotheby's, New York, 5th November 2002, lot 54)
Purchased at the above sale by the late owner
LITERATURE
André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Chagall, Paris, 1974, no. 124, illustrated p. 168
NOTE
Themes of love and devotion were enormously popular in Chagall's art. Many of these pictures paid tribute to the artist's wife Bella, who had died in the 1940s, but whose image lived on in the artist's later work. Usually these depictions featured tender exchanges between young couples and celebrated the blissfulness of their love. The subject of the present painting is friendship, one of the many facets of the complex relationship of two young lovers.
In the present work, Chagall used a deep marine blue and emerald green, investing the picture with the luminous tonality of stained-glass. In addition to the couple, unidentified figures appear throughout the composition and enhance the dream-like and magical quality of this scene. Dicussing similarly-themed paintings, Susan Compton has written: 'It was a vision of 'real' love, that love which the artist was to share with his wife Bella [...] this celebration by the lovers is equally fantastic, for their joy has levitated them from the ground. Their faces are real enough, but now their position is imaginary. Yet by this device Chagall has conveyed the magic carpet of human love, borrowed perhaps from the world of the folk tale, where the hero and heroine live happily ever after' (S. Compton, Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Art, London, 1985, pp. 15-16).
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