Marc Chagall

René Dreyfus, Paris (until at least 1953)
Galerie Framond, Paris
Galerie René Drouet, Paris
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., New York (acquired from the above in 1965)
Ronne & Joseph S. Wohl, New York (acquired from the above in 1966. Sale: Sotheby’s, New York, 9^th November 2000, lot 16)
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Granoff, Marc Chagall, 1926, no. 10
Paris, Galerie Guy Stein, Des fleurs et des fruits, 1936, no. 61
Cannes, Festival du Film de Cannes, 1947, no. 85
Zurich, Kunsthaus, Marc Chagall, 1950-51, no. 45
Bern, Kunsthalle, Marc Chagall, 1951, no. 43
Turin, Museo Civico, L’Opera di Marc Chagall, 1953, no. 56 (as dating from 1929)
Hamburg, Kunstverein; Munich, Haus der Kunst & Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Marc Chagall, 1959, no. 80, illustrated in the catalogue
New York, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., Retrospective of a Gallery, Twenty Years, 1973, no. 16
Roslyn Harbor, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Marc Chagall, 1998, no. 110

Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1963, no. 392, illustrated

Fleurs is an important example of Chagall's early still-lifes from the 1920, exploring the imagery to which he would return continuously throughout his career. By 1926 when he painted Fleurs, Chagall had been living in France for three years. Memories of his formative years in Russia were never far from the surface – between 1924 and 1927 he completed a series of illustrations of Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls and painted new versions of works that had been left behind in Russia and Germany – but his delight in being back in France led to a new lyricism and sensuality in his work. Franz Meyer has remarked:

‘What now caught Chagall’s fancy was nature, light, and landscape … What is really new, however, is Chagall’s reaction to flowers. No longer are they mere isolated supports for the bright colors, as in the Brittany works, or part of a luxuriant vegetation as in autumn 1924, but fragments of nature that reflect the soft, homely light of his native land … In a group of pictures that was probably painted later, the bunches of flowers occupy still more space, dividing the background into various sections which are reduced to isolated motifs framing the flowers. Small winged beings, genii embodying natural forces, and other figures float in the air, one flies right through the tick of the bouquet as if it were in the sky. Chagall spent a long time of many of these works, picking them up and putting them aside again.

This explains, for instance, why the Flowers in the window (the present work) are handled differently from those painted at Montchauvet’ (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, Life and Work, New York, 1963, pp. 337 and 343). Particularly striking in the present work is the contrast between the heavy impasto and deeply saturated colours of the bouquet of flowers and the pearlescent tones of the thinly brushed background from which emerge the lively creatures of Chagall’s imagination.