Beautiful Sunday Under Eiffel Tower

#89030     60″ X 40″    ac

• Monet: Le Dejeuner sur L’Herbe”, 1862-63, Louvre, Paris.
• Seurat: “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”, 1884-86. Chicago Art Institute.
• Gauguin: “Maternity”, 1896, private collection, USA
• Chagall: “The Birthday”, 1923. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY

In all of Chen’s work it is hard to find a painting with a more saturated and varied iconography than this.

From front to back:
On the leading edge is one of Chen’s favorite images, a basket of fruit.

In the foreground Dejeuner sur L’Herbe/Picnic on the Grass, which was one of the first works of modern painting [along with two other paintings by Edouard Manet (1832-1883), “La Musique aux Tuilleries, 1861”, and “Olympia 1863”. Picnic, with its formally clad figures and the inexplicable nude, caused scandal, and it was refused by the 1862 Salon.

In the upper half of the canvas: icons of all sorts.
There is a mythology of sorts to all the icons. The promenading figures with parasol and the two women seated on the grass became characters in the Broadway musical about Seurat, Sunday in the Park with George. The two figure moving into the picture from the right is Van Gogh on his way to the town of Tarascon, which was the locale of many of Alphonse Daudet’s fanciful stories. Gauguin celebrates the myths and moeurs of Tahiti, and flying in the midst of heaven Chagall figures add to the folklore, as does the astronautic figure and the tower itself.

So count seven major icon manifestations, with the painting styles adding at least four more.

– Lawrence Jeppson