Lot 223 : MARC CHAGALL
Auction Location: United States of America - 2001
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Description:
MARC CHAGALL
1887-1985
LE VIOLONISTE AU MONDE
RENVERSE
Signed and dated 1929
Oil on canvas
36 1/2 by 28 3/4 in. 92.7 by 73 cm.
Provenance
Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris (acquired from the artist)
Galerie A. Barreiro, Paris
Mary Katherine Woodworth, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania (acquired from the above on July 8, 1938)
Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania (a gift from the above in 1988 and sold: Habsburg-Feldman, New York, May 8, 1989, lot 41)
Exhibited
The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Masterpieces from Philadelphia Private Collections, Part II, 1950-51, no. 12
Literature
RenE Schwob, Chagall et l'ame juive, Paris, 1931 illustrated pl. 12
Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall - Life and Work, New York, 1963, no. 543,
illustrated
Chagall spent the years 1923-41 in France, his second visit. In 1923, the poet Blaise Cendrars wrote to Chagall in order to facilitate a commission from Ambroise Vollard to provide illustrations for a book of his choosing (this turned out to be Dead Souls, executed in 1923-27). By early 1924, the artist and his family returned to Paris and found a studio in the Avenue d'OrlEans. Susan Compton has written that, "From 1927 onwards Chagall was recognized as a leading painter of the Ecole de Paris, an accolade that persisted for many years (even after his return to Paris in 1948)... As the 1920s drew to a close a new mood becomes apparent in Chagll's work (for instance, Russian Village, 1923-24), reflecting his continuing contacts with Russia - 1927 saw a visit to Paris by the Moscow Yiddish theatre... In 1930 Chagall helped find a theatre for the director Meyerhold's Paris tour. Thus he was kept fully informed of political changes in the USSR and the new policies for art" (Susan Compton, Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p. 180). Two of his best known painting were executed in the 1920s, The Green Violinist (The Solomon R.Guggenheim Museum, New York) and I and the Village (The Museum of Modern Art, New York).
The violinist or fiddler is the quintessential type in Chagall's repertory of figures, one with which he felt a lifelong empathy. Werner Haftmann commented: "The fiddler has always been in Chagall's mind. Ever since 1908 he had constantly appeared in a variety of scenes. He was a central figure in the festivities of the Jewish community in the Russian suburb, and his tune accompanied the basic events of life - birth, marriage, and the funeral. By making his appearance at these important moments in life, he became an almost legendary figure - the attendant of human destiny - in the life pattern of the community. He appears as such in Chagall's pictures of birth, weddings, and funerals. But to him the fiddler was also representative of the artist; a solitary individual, isolated by the strangeness and mystery of his art, he had communion with the powers of the beyond. Thus in The Dead Man of 1908, Chagall had already expressed this idea in the symbol of the fiddler on the roof, a metaphorical figure who can be identified with its creator and becomes a kind of synonym for Chagall himself" (Werner Haftmann, Chagall, New York, 1984, p. 70)
Perhaps Chagall's earliest depiction of the solo fiddler is the Seated Violinist in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, a watercolor dating from 1908. Between 1911 and 1914, Chagall executed an oil painting of a standing, bearded fiddler accompanied by a beggar boy, now in the Kunstsammlung Nordhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf. Other related works of major importance are The Musician of 1912-13 (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, see fig. 1) and The Green Violinist of 1923-24 (The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, see fig. 2).
This painting was acquired by Mary Katherine Woodworth, a member of the Faculty of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, during a summer trip to Europe in 1938. She bequeathed this painting to the College, asking that the proceeds from the sale of the painting go to provide scholarship support for students. The Trustees of the Bryn Mawr College sold this work in 1989.
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