Marc Chagall

Galerie Maeght, Zurich

Private Collection (sold: Sotheby’s, London, 31st March 1982, lot 93)

General Media Fine Arts Inc., New York (purchased at the above sale. Sold: Sotheby's, New York, 13th May 1992, lot 90)

Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Zurich, Galerie Maeght, Marc Chagall, 1981, no. 6, illustrated in colour in the catalogue

The canvas is unlined and there is no evidence of retouching under ultra-violet light. This work is in very good original condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate in the printed catalogue illustration, although brighter, richer and more varied in the original.
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Painted in 1978, La Muse makes full play of the artist’s beguiling and deeply personal imagery in a work that explores the sources of his artistic inspiration on a grand scale. Suffused with a soulful blue, the softly filtered light and outlined forms reflect the aesthetic of stained glass, a medium that occupied much of Chagall’s time during the 1960s (fig. 1). Moreover, the blue emphasises the sense of reflection and nostalgia that characterise many of his later works. By 1978 Chagall had much to reflect on: Russia remained at the forefront of his mind – even more so following his emotional visit in 1973 after an absence of over fifty years – yet at the same time he had been happily settled in Vence for many years. Widely acclaimed and sought after, he could reflect in comfort on his artistic success, a position consolidated in the 1970s by the opening of the Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice in 1973 and by the presentation of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour in 1977.

 

In La Muse this reflective mood encompasses and reconciles the many and varied influences on the artist’s work. Underpinning the central tableau of figures we glimpse two familiar landscapes that embody important sources of inspiration for Chagall. At the top, basking in the dreamy light of a crescent moon, we see a few assorted rooftops in the style that Chagall used throughout his career to evoke the rural dwellings of his Russian birthplace, Vitebsk. Similarly, at the cockerel’s feet lies a hazy Parisian skyline rendered instantly recognisable by the Eiffel Tower and the seductive sway of the Seine in the foreground. Both landscapes were an integral part of Chagall’s creative vocabulary; the rural life he experienced in Vitebsk was the subject of his earliest forays into artistic expression and remained a mainstay of his personal symbolism; Paris, which the artist first visited in 1910, was also to have a lasting impression (fig. 2). Chagall emphasised their dual importance in his artistic development: ‘The root-soil of my art was Vitebsk, but like a tree, my art needed Paris like water, otherwise it would wither and die’ (quoted in James Johnson Sweeney, ‘An Interview with Marc Chagall’, in Jacob Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 278).

 

These landscapes are unified by the imagery that typically populates Chagall’s compositions. Here, the two human figures are united by a cockerel, rendered larger than life, and a goat that gazes down like a benevolent god from above. Exemplary of the cornucopia of iconic motifs that recur like a lilting refrain in Chagall’s work, they transform the canvas into a subtle mediation between dream and reality. These two worlds come together as the artist, palette in hand, stretches towards the ethereal creature on the left of the painting and the young woman appears to come alive. This tender Pygmalionism, assimilating the artist with the lover in the centre of the canvas, gently emphasises the relationship between artist and subject, focusing our attention on the dynamic of their interaction.

 

The figure of the artist at work is a motif that recurs frequently in Chagall’s œuvre, and he pursued it with vigour in his later years. In the present work he evokes both the classical trope that personified artistic inspiration, and the art historical tradition of the artist and his muse. As with many artists, exemplified in the modern age by contemporaries such as Picasso and Modigliani, Chagall looked to the women of his life for inspiration. The youthful features and white dress of this bride recall the artist’s first love and inspiration, Bella: ‘Always present - watching, advising, refining - she supplied echo and answers to artistic questions, formed contacts, removed obstacles. She was and still is the archetype of the loved one, the bride who leans toward her young groom in so many pictures, the tender girl who dreams in her lover’s arms’ (Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1961, pp. 465-466). At the same time, the structure of the present work recalls Chagall’s 1966 portrait of his second wife, Vava, in which he chose to depict her seated before a canvas as though in the artist’s studio, thus emphasising her centrality in his creative process. Throughout his life, Chagall’s most productive periods coincided with intervals of harmonious domesticity and in La Muse he grounds the classical idea of the artist’s muse firmly in the visual realm of his own experience.