Christ au couple en rouge

The Comité Marc Chagall has confirmed the authenticity of this work.

Filled with a heady sense of romance and poignant personal history, Marc Chagall’s Christ au couple rouge presents many of the quintessential themes and motifs of the artist’s long and prolific career. Painted in 1958, this work depicts a nocturnal scene in which figures and a rooster float over the picturesque town of Vence, in the south of France. The composition is centered around the tender image of an embracing couple in a blazing red circle that contrasts with the surrounding blue sky. A symbol of Chagall’s early life in the rural town of Vitebsk, a yellow rooster presides over the night sky, hovering above the deep blue roofs as an iridescent stand-in for the moon. On the right side of the composition, the image of Christ looms large, bridging the earthly town below with the otherworldly nocturnal visions above and keeping watch, perhaps, over the fortunes of the red couple.

Christ au couple en rouge was painted in 1958, eight years after Chagall moved to Vence. It was not until Chagall moved to the south of France that he once again began to feel settled and at ease. The artist bought a house called “Les Collines,” which would remain his home for sixteen years, longer than he had lived anywhere else throughout his life, and he was joined there two years later by Vava. Chagall experienced a period of great happiness and contentment, describing his life in Vence as, “a bouquet of roses” (Chagall, quoted in, S. Alexander, Marc Chagall: A Biography, New York, 1978, p. 492).

Under the brilliant light of the Côte d’Azur and once more blissfully in love, Chagall’s painting became increasingly imbued with radiant and intense colour. In the present lot, the composition is suffused with rich hues of azure blue, ruby red, green and yellow. As Franz Meyer, Chagall’s biographer and son-in-law has written: “Chagall’s new sojourn in the south exerted a decisive influence on his art. The light, the vegetation, the rhythm of life, all contributed to the rise of a more relaxed, airy, sensuous style in which the magic of the colour dominates…” (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, London, 1964, p. 519).

Though immersed in his new life in France, Chagall’s Russian heritage remained a constant feature of his art. The rooster and the image of Christ depicted here are among the artist’s most recurrent motifs, references to Chagall’s rural upbringing in the Russian town of Vitebsk, as well as to his Jewish heritage. From nostalgia and love, to music and colour, it is in this way that every aspect of Chagall’s art is infused with a deeply poignant and personal meaning; as he once stated: “It is my whole life that is identified with my work” (Chagall, quoted in J. Wullschlager, Chagall Love and Exile, London, 2008, p. 333). Large in scale and richly layered with gouache, pastel, and ink, the present lot captures the poetic and autobiographical essence of Chagall’s oeuvre whilst in Vence.

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