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Marc Chagall

(1887-1985)

Corbeille au soleil (Gordes)

c.1938-39

gouache, watercolours and pencil on paper

60.5 x 48.6 cm (23⅞ x 19⅛ in.)

signed ‘Chagall Marc’ (lower right)

Private collection, Switzerland
Thence by descent

This work is accompanied by a certificate from Jean-Louis Prat, on behalf of the Comité Chagall, dated 14 December 2004 (no. 2004109B).

By the time Chagall executed this scintillating gouache, he was a very well-established artist having had his first major retrospective at the Basel Kunsthalle in 1933, and receiving an important commission from dealer Ambroise Vollard to illustrate the Bible in 105 plates. Chagall was also fully settled in France, having obtained French citizenship in June 1937, a true relief given the turn of events in his own country. Despite all this success, the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the rise of Soviet communism and Stalin’s purges of 1936-8 – including the murder of Chagall’s favorite art teacher, Yuri Moyseevich Pen - and the shadow of the Nazi regime were falling upon Europe. In 1937, German minister Joseph Goebbels ordered to purge German museums of their holdings of so-called ‘degenerate’ art, which according to the Nazis, was an art that did not capture the true Aryan spirit, encompassing mainly the modern art trends such as Cubism, Expressionism, Surrealism and Abstract Art. Chagall’s works were not spared from this looting of over 20,000 works, and ten of his works were confiscated from German public collections to be included, and consequently mocked, at the infamous Entartete Kunst exhibition, inaugurated in Munich in July 1937. 

Yet Chagall was grateful to be French; he loved Paris and especially the French countryside that he extensively visited with his wife Bella in the 1930s. France stood for him as the land of ‘lumière-liberté’ –‘the light of freedom which I had seen nowhere else’, he wrote, ‘And this light, reborn in art, passed easily onto the canvases of the great French masters… Only this ‘lumière-liberté’ can give birth to such sparkling canvases, where technical revolutions are just as natural as the language, the gesture, the work of the passerby in the street’ (‘Address at Mount Holyoke College, August 1943’, in B. Harshav, ed., Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, 2003, p. 68). This ‘lumière-liberté’ particularly emanates from the present gouache, Corbeille au soleil (Gordes), gleaming with bright colours enhanced by the fresh blue pigment used, and flooding the room with warm sunshine from the open window. When the war broke out in 1939, Chagall, his wife Bella, his daughter Ida and her husband Michel Gordey, fled Paris to move south of the Loire and finally to settle in Gordes, where on 10 May 1940 – the very day German armies invaded Belgium – Chagall purchased a house in this charming provençal town in which he hoped to safely spend the duration of the war. The basket full of juicy plump fruits – shining with the reflection of this ‘lumière-liberté’ - takes up more than a quarter of the composition. They seem to be waiting to be eaten by the person who will sit in the empty chair on which a shawl has been thrown. The fruits’ connotation of abundance, joy, life, is furthermore complemented by the notion of freedom and escape to another brighter world, hinted by the open window, a recurrent motif throughout Chagall’s œuvre. Despite the realism of this scene in sunny Gordes - as always with Chagall - the artist takes us into his dreamy world as not only the fruit basket but also the whole setting appear to float in space, as suggested by Chagall’s faded edges. Barely a year later, the place Chagall naively thought was a safe refuge from the war, would become just a memory given that Chagall and his family were compelled to leave France in 1941 – escaping just in time to avoid from being deported to concentration camps like so many other Jews and refugees in France - and were exiled to America, where they started a new chapter of their lives in New York.

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