Marc Chagall

Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York

Private Collection

Acquired from the above by the present owner

New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Marc Chagall, Le Cirque, Paintings 1969-80, 1981, no. 14, illustrated in the catalogue

Original canvas. The surface is fresh and the impasto is intact. Under ultra-violet light, there is no evidence of retouching. This work is in excellent condition. Colors: The colors in the catalogue are fairly accurate.
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Chagall found an endless amount of pleasure in depicting the visual splendor of the circus.  Throughout his career he drew great creative energy from watching the event, and some of his most important canvases are fantastic depictions that exaggerate the pageantry of the performance.  This picture, which the artist painted only five years before his death, maintains that sense of excitement and pageantry that so transfixed the artist when he first began painting this theme in the early part of the twentieth century.

"It is a magic world, circus," Chagall wrote in the exhibition catalogue of the Pierre Matisse Gallery show where the present work made its debut.  "A timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of great art....The circus seems to me like the most tragic show on earth. Throughout the centuries, it has been man's most poignant cry in his search for amusement and joy.  It often takes the form of high poetry.  I seem to see a Don Quixote in search of an ideal, like that inspired clown who wept and dreamed of human love" (M. Chagall, in Marc Chagall, Le Cirque, Paintings 1969-80 (ex. cat.), op. cit.).

 

Although this picture is mostly populated by circus performers, these characters had many levels of significance for the artist.  To him, they represented the many faces of man's emotional character, both fun-loving and tragic.  He once wrote, "I have always considered the clowns, acrobats, and actors as being tragically human who, for me, would resemble characters from certain religious paintings.  And even today, when I paint a Crucifixion or another religious painting, I experience again almost the same sensations that I felt while painting circus people, and yet there is nothing literary in these paintings, and it is very difficult to explain why I find a psycho-plastic resemblance between the two kinds of composition" (ibid.).

Chagall's fascination with the circus dates back to his childhood in Vitebsk and his years in Paris when he frequently attended the circus with his daughter Ida and Ambroise Vollard. As Venturi explains, "The importance of the circus motif in modern French literature and painting is well known; in painting it suffices to recall the names of Seurat and Rouault. As always, Chagall's images of circus people ... are at once burlesque and tender. Their perspective of sentiment, their fantastic forms, suggest that the painter is amusing himself in a freer mood than usual; and the result is eloquent of the unmistakable purity flowing from Chagall's heart.  These circus scenes are mature realizations of earlier dreams" (L. Venturi, Marc Chagall, New York, 1945, p. 39).