Marc Chagall
Belarusian, 1887-1985 (active France)

Blue Angel, 1937
gouache and pastel

Michael Armand Hammer and the Armand Hammer Foundation
Loan



Marc Chagall, Self Portrait, 1960

"When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art." - Marc Chagall

COMMENTS

The theatrical blue-red color harmony of this work and its juxtaposition of normally unrelated figures, floating and dreamlike, are typical of Chagall. Although the angel may have been in Chagall’s mind particularly because of the illustrations for the Bible he had been commissioned by Ambroise Vollard to do in the early 1920s, both it and the bouquet of flowers are common in his scenes of lovers and newlyweds. Franz Meyer suggests that the “new natural sensuousness” of the pictures of 1937-39 was the result of the increased security in Chagall’s personal affairs during that time.

- The Armand Hammer Collection: Five Centuries of Masterpieces, Los Angeles, 1981

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

Chagall’s personal iconography remained remarkably consistent throughout his career. Favorite motifs include angels, fish, barnyard animals, and birds, as found in this exuberant composition, all of which he imagines as if floating in air through childlike drawings embellished with jewel tones. The dream-like quality of Chagall’s imagery has often been related to the early 20th-century art movement known as Surrealism. However, the artist rejected this identification, unwilling to embrace the unconscious as a source of artistic invention, as advocated by Surrealist practice.

- Ridley-Tree Gallery 2016