MARC CHAGALL | Soleil au cheval rouge

signed and dated 1977; signed on the reverse

Galerie Maeght, Paris 
Private Collection
Sotheby’s, London, 26th June 1990, lot 41(sold at USD 3.4M)
Private Collection, Japan (acquired circa 1990)
Acquired from the above by the present owner The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Comité Chagall

Paris, Galerie Maeght, Marc Chagall, 1979, cat. no. 5

Maeght ed., Derrière Le Miroir No. 235, Paris, October 1979, no. 5, illustrated p. 30

The work is in very good condition. There is no sign of restoration under UV light examination.
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‘It’s a magic world, the circus’, Chagall once wrote, ‘an age-old game that is danced, and in which tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of great art […]. The circus is the performance that seems to me the most tragic. Throughout the centuries, it has been man’s most piercing cry in his search for entertainment and joy.  It often takes the form of lofty poetry. I seem to see a Don Quixote in search of an ideal, like that marvellous clown who wept and dreamed of human love’ (M. Chagall, Le Cirque, New York, 1981). Ever since his childhood, when he had seen acrobats in the streets of the Russian town of Vitebsk where he lived with his family, Chagall had been fascinated by the theme of the circus, and often returned to this subject in his œuvre. The arrival of the circus signified the sudden invasion of the wondrous in to the rhythm of everyday life, the transformation of the humdrum into a form of art that left behind a lingering sensation of happiness and amazement. For Chagall, this had an allegorical connection with his own art and its performance. As Lionello Venturi explained: ‘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).

Chagall found an endless amount of pleasure in depicting the visual splendour 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. However, for him the circus was not only a form of creative inspiration – a spectacle – it also held a more profound significance. Susan Compton discusses this aspect of his work, writing: ‘although one could point directly to the evenings he spent at the Cirque d’Hiver with Vollard in the late 1920s (when the artist was going to make a suite of etchings on the circus), or those months in Vence (when he was invited to attend the shooting of a circus film in 1956), his clowns and acrobats, his equestriennes and musicians are clearly not a simple record of time and place. The circus had a profound relevance for the artist as a mirror of life’ (S. Compton, Chagall (exhibition catalogue), The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, p. 14).

Chagall was particularly attuned to the human element of the circus and its poignant combination of comedy and tragedy. The characters he depicted – trapeze artists, musicians, tumblers, gymnasts, clowns – all had an individual importance and like many artists before him he was intrigued by the way these stock ‘characters’ could be used to reveal something about the human condition. 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’ (M. Chagall, ‘The Circus’, in Jacob Baal-Teshuva (ed.), Chagall. A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 198).

This seriousness, however, does not belie the great energy and vivacity of Chagall’s circus paintings; the circus was also a means of escape for both himself as artist and for the viewer. In his later years, as Chagall looked back on half a century of tumultuous history, this aspect of the circus came ever more to the forefront of his paintings. He made explicit reference to the ‘grotesque circus’ of war and revolution, writing, ‘I wish I could hide all these troubling thoughts in and feelings in the opulent tail of a circus horse and run after it, like a little clown, begging for mercy, begging it to chase the sadness from the world’ (ibid., p. 197). This is certainly true of Soleil au cheval rouge (Lot 1018) in which the artist combines the visual imagery of the circus with the cornucopia of motifs that were part of his distinctive visual language and which in his later paintings indicate a growing contentment. The setting is a great circus ring, with an enraptured crowd looking on; clowns cavort, a trapeze artist is suspended in graceful arabesque and at the centre of the scene a young dancer raises a hand as if to address a waiting audience. The scene is suffused by the light of a benevolent sun, which, holding a violin, seems to symbolise all the warmth and vibrant energy, the sights and sounds, of the circus. In the immediate foreground a circus horse – a figure of almost totemic importance for Chagall – looks on, but in this work, the bare-back rider who appears in so many of his circus paintings is replaced by a pair of lovers. Gracefully entwined, they are emblematic of Chagall’s two great loves: his first wife, Bella, and Vava, who he married in 1952. In the later paintings the lovers often symbolise both a nostalgia for the past and the happiness that Chagall experienced when he settled in the South of France following the war. In Soleil au cheval rouge they reinforce the sense that this is a painting about the magic and laughter and joy of the circus, chasing the sadness from the world and ushering in a new era of peace.