Based on Chagall’s famed oil painting by the same name, Le Mort is an exquisite variation on one of the artist’s most profound motifs. The subject of "the dead man" first appears in Chagall’s work in 1908 during his years as an art student and apprentice in St. Petersburg and carries on through the artist’s oeuvre, reinvented each t.mes over.
“If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, color it with our colors of love and hope.”
As the artist’s biographer Franz Meyer writes, the scene of Le Mort conjures visions of Chagall’s youth in his Vitebsk shtetl, the dreamlike depiction “linked with recollects ions of his childhood.” Meyer continues, “as Chagall relates…‘Suddenly one morning, well before dawn, shouts rose from the street below our windows. By the faint light from the night lamp, I managed to make out a woman, alone, running through the deserted streets. She is waiving her arms, sobbings , imploring the inhabitants, still asleep, to come and save her husband... The dead man, solemnly sad, is already laid out on the floor, his face illuminated by six candles’” (Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1964, p. 64).
Meyer goes on to explain how the imaginative composition came to be: while in the home of a painting student of his, Chagall glanced out the window and “was struck by the view of the empty, strangely deserted street. But how could he paint that air of desolation, of impending tragedy? Naturalistic methods alone were quite inadequate and he was repelled by literary allegory. ‘How could I paint a street, with psychic forms but without literature? How could I compose a street as black as a corpse but without symbolism?’ he asked himself. But… imagined figures put in an appearance to express, by their arrangement and interplay in the composition, just that mood and help to render this strange sensation” (ibid.).
Now in the collects ions of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the 1908 painting of Le Mort (see fig. 1) was (along with about 50 others from that period) stolen by a frame maker in St. Petersburg who had kept Chagall’s paintings on consignment, only to later confiscate the works and deny ever knowing the young artist. Over the subsequent years, Chagall would create at least three variations of the composition in gouache (including the present work), recapturing and reinventing the iconic scene lost in Russia.
The Evolution of Le Mort on paper
In the years following Chagall’s departure from St. Petersburg and later Vitebsk, Chagall found a primacy of color in his work while in Paris. Influenced by the artistic circles of the bohemian capital, the artist’s work took on bold facets of color of the Fauve and Orphic circles as well as the geometric and planar divisionism of the Cubists. In contrast to the 1908 oil, the present work exhibits a brilliant background rendered in bold primary hues. Among the most resolved of the gouaches, the present work places primacy on the prone figure in the street haloed by candlelight, This portion of the composition is matched in brightness only by the yellow sky which contradicts the impending sense of night posited by the darkness in the foreground. Reacting to the fallen man, a woman wails to his right while a street sweeper goes about his routine. A mysterious figure seems to raid the foremost of the red homes, toppling planters in his wake. Removed from the scene down below, a man with a violin sits atop a chimney on the roof of the blue home at left, setting forth one of the most iconic figures in modern theatrical history.
“On the roof of the house to the left sits a hatted man playing the violin. He “ is fiddling his melody…to the dancing wind that howls over the sullen sky.”
Chagall’s character of the "Fiddler on the Roof" inspired the musical of the same name which celebrated life in a devout Jewish community (see fig. 2). Later works, like Chagall’s Le Violiniste from 1912-13 (see fig. 3) and Green Violinist from 1923-24 (see fig. 5) focus almost entirely on the figure of the fiddler and serve as an ode to the musical, celebratory and even epitaphian traditions of shtetl life in the artist’s native Vitebsk. Like the Green Violinist, the present work was created not long after the artist’s monumental commission to design sets for the Jewish Theater, adding a heighten sense of drama and stage-like quality to his compositions from this period (see fig. 4).
Held in the same collects ion for more than twenty years, Le Mort comes to auction for the first t.mes .
Center: Fig. 4 Marc Chagall, Les Maisonettes rouges, 1922, oil on canvas, sold: Replica Shoes ’s London, 3 February 2015, lot 34 for $4.97 million © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Right: Fig. 5 Marc Chagall, Green Violiniste, 1923-24, oil on canvas, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York © 2022 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York