Love Above Rich and Poor

#87009     88 X 130 cm    oc

• Picasso: “Frugal Meal”, etching, 1904
• Cezanne: “Fruit Dish and Apples”
• Chagall: “Resurrection at the River”, 1947

This is the second of Chen’s rhapsodically ironic paintings using Picasso’s “The Frugal Meal” as the dominating icon. The subject is the most famous of Picasso’s early etchings. In the original the meal consists of a scrap of bread and a little wine in one of two glasses. A shallow bowl is empty, and cheap wine bottle appears to be.In his earlier version, The “Dream of Poor Lovers”, Chen changed the spartan repast to a feast of fruit adapted from a Caravaggio still life, “Dessert”, and serenaded the couple with Chagall’s large “Green Violinist”. In this new version Chen has switched fruit dealers, and the couple can feast from Cezanne. The violinist has been dismissed, replaced by other Chagall icons, notably a floating Christ, whom the couple seems to ignore. One doubts that they have said grace for their bounties. If not, then the Christ figure can hardly be beneficent.Not bound by any colors in the etching, Chen has absolute freedom in adding and modulating colors in any way that would create an arresting image and advance the iconography of the total composition.Chen has made the man a striking blue to call attention to Picasso’s blue period. Although the woman is an electric gold her flesh does suggest Picasso’s pink period.

The female figure floating from the bottle suggests an alcoholic reverie, mixing a rowboat on a river in the moonlight and a village with a church. The figures the woman dreams of hardly seem benign, even though Chen’s title would have us believe otherwise.

– Lawrance Jeppson