Chagall’s artistic vision is encapsulated in Les marguerites, which combines two of the artist’s most iconic themes in a wonderfully dream-like composition. Painted in 1925, only a couple of years after the artist had returned to Paris, it is suffused with the optimism that characterised his early years in the country that would become his home.
‘In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.’
Realised as a glorious close-up, the centrepiece of the composition is a luxuriant bouquet of white daisies. Scattered across the canvas, the flowers appear like stars against the darker green foliage which is rendered with the precision typical of Chagall’s pre-war style. Beneath this canopy, a bride and groom embrace, sharing a tender kiss. The combination of these two motifs had its origins some years earlier; as Susan Compton has noted the theme, ‘was initiated by the small bouquet which Bella holds in The Birthday of 1915’ (S. Compton in Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1985, pp. 211-212), now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York (fig. 1). It was on his return to Paris in the 1920s that Chagall would begin to pursue the theme in earnest and the imagery of bridal couples and flowers would remain central to his art over the decades that followed.
In Les marguerites as in so much of his work, the bridal couple are intended to evoke the artist himself, with his wife Bella. Chagall met Bella Rosenfeld in 1909, and according to his later accounts, fell immediately in love with her. They were married in 1915 and when they both moved together to France in 1923, their arrival ushered in a new period of contentment for Chagall. The dream-like space of the present composition echoes the way the artist spoke of Bella and France: ‘I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love and flowers flooded in’ (quoted in Marc Chagall (exhibition catalogue), Grand Palais, Paris, 1969). The association between lovers and flowers, which is another recurring image in his work, took on a new significance around 1924, when Chagall discovered the beauty of the landscape in the Seine valley, which he explored with his friends Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and the profusion of the flowers in the South of France which he visited that year. As Elisabeth Pacoud-Rème observed: ‘From 1923 to 1935, Chagall experienced a period of happy acclimatisation the effects of which shine through his work. He painted numerous bouquets, exuberant and luminous, showing through this, a taste for nature that in his maturity he would also express through landscape […]. The bouquets of this period, veritable exercises in painting, are not however exempt from the symbolism often associated with this genre or allusions to the passage of t.mes . Indeed Chagall said in a Jewish-American journal in 1932: “Flowers? I can’t watch them die and I put them into my canvases and so they live a little longer”’ (E. Pacoud-Rème in Chagall entre guerre et paix (exhibition catalogue), Musée de Luxembourg, Paris, 2013, p. 88, translated from French).
This sense of nostalgia – that flowers might also represent the fragile and ephemeral aspect of life – would become more pronounced in his later pictures; in the present work the focus remains in the moment. The quick brushstrokes that delineate the bridal couple emphasise both the passion and the momentary nature of the embrace. Les marguerites has the distinctive textured appearance of Chagall’s work of this period; the stippled brushstrokes combine with the palette of whites and greens to convey a softness that in turn imbues the whole picture with a particular tenderness. It is an effusive declaration of love that represents the real happiness that Chagall experienced during these early years in France. As Andrew Kagan notes: ‘This was a period [the mid-to-late 1920s] of unrivaled happiness and contentment for Chagall. He and Bella were able to discover the joys of traveling throughout France, where the artist fell in love with the varied landscapes and the distinctive effects of light. These journeys yielded works with a brilliant new illumination and an unprecedented airiness […]. There also appeared paintings of intense color and lyric forms […] which express the renewed spirit of romance and youthfulness that he and Bella found in their pleasant new circumstances’ (A. Kagan, Marc Chagall, New York, 1989, p. 53).