Joie
Oil on canvas mounted on cardboard, um1982
With partial overpainted signature stamp of the Sucession Marc Chagall upper right .45,7 x 38 cm (17,9 x 14,9 inch ).
Inscribed in Cyrillic-Latin mixed writing possibly with the title "T(ch)ouge" on the reverse .

Expertise: With a certificate no. 96834 by Jean-Louis Prat, from the Comité Marc Chagall, Paris, from 15th April 1996

Origin: Private collection Italy.

In his late work Chagall frequently reverted to motifs with which he had been particularly successful in his painting, now varying them at will. 'Joie' (Joy) is a composition built up of signature elements from his œuvre. Both the loving couple hovering over the village and the bouquet are permanent and familiar fixtures of an iconography with which Chagall worked throughout his career. Narrative content invariably informs his pictures and in this they are rooted in 19th-century painting. This feature, on the other hand, is what makes them easily accessible to a broader public. The bold palette which Chagall was so fond of in the last years of his life has been deployed here to make the scene depicted particularly expressive. It is indeed the dominant aspect of this composition. The palette is what translates everything to an unreal plane. Chagall loved hovering states of being, the unreal, which nonetheless takes on concrete, recognisable form in figuration. This picture may be said to summarize his repertoire of pictorial elements and their semantic content, which this important artist is here deliberately quoting in retrospect.