Sotheby’s – Chagall Through the Decades: A Selling Exhibition

April 17th, 2012 by

La Nuit enchantée of 1964 isa quintessential example of Chagall’smastery in assembling an array off olkloric images in a dense and colourful composition. This work contains several of the most important elements of hispictorial iconography; the bride, the clown-musician, the goat, the bouquetof flowers and the rooster. Each figure is masterfully rendered through a matrix of intense colour and spatial experimentation that epitomised Chagall’s work, reflecting his own very personal delight in the act of artistic creation. As Susan Compton wrote in the catalogue of the Royal Academy Chagall retrospective: ‘Throughout his life certain themes recur in the work of
Chagall: the circus, lovers and peasantstake their place beside more sombre scenes of suffering and death […]
‘For the themes in Chagall’s art are timeless, not confined to a single epochof history, but reminding man of the continuity of  life for generation after generation, since the earliest days of recorded time.