Moi et le village is a seminal work in the oeuvre of Marc Chagall, commenting on the relationship between the artist and his place of birth while illustrating the development of Chagall’s own artistic language in early twentieth-century Paris. Chagall moved to France in 1910 at the age of twenty-three and fully immersed himself in the European avant-garde, however, his hometown of Vitebsk continued to haunt his canvases. The artist first depicted the composition of Moi et le village in 1911 when he produced the large-scale oil on canvas now in The Museum of Modern Art, New York (see fig. 1). The present work is a later reworking dating from 1923-24 of this same motif, a figure and goat gazing into each other’s eyes interspersed with scenes of village life in the background—an iconoclastic and fiercely modern tableau.

When Chagall arrived in Paris in 1910, he already brought with him a small but markedly individual oeuvre, which was distinguished by its fanciful narrative descriptions of the major events he came across in the life cycle he had experienced in the Jewish quarter of his hometown—namely birth, marriage and death. Life was dictated by the cyclical rhythm of the seasons, living in harmony with the harvest and one’s farm animals. A seated figure milking a goat symbolizes the cycle of the seasons as a source of life while the figure in the foreground holding a tree references the Tree of Life. A symbolic celebration of life itself, the tree represents both rebirth and immortality and was frequently employed by Chagall for this purpose. When Chagall executed the composition of Moi et le village in 1911, he was a young artist who had left Russia behind to begin a new life in Paris, intent on making his mark on the world. As he built a new home, he was nostalgic for his homeland and partner Bella Rosenfeld, also a native of Vitebsk, for whom he would eventually return to Russia in 1914.

In Paris, Chagall explored new pictorial means to articulate fully the extraordinary fluidity of his imagination, looking towards Cubism to translate his own feelings, memories and symbols. The major artistic movement in Paris at the t.mes , Cubism was led by Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso (see fig. 2). Chagall was strongly influenced by their novel treatment of three-dimensionality and space. His rapid absorption of Cubism is apparent in the present work in which the depiction of space has become increasingly flattened and fragmented. The strong geometric lines of the figure at right (most likely a self-portrait) and the goat at left are further amplified by the circular shapes of the sun and moon between them that also serve to underline the symbolic nature of the image.

Chagall was also influenced at this t.mes by Robert Delaunay and his wife Sonia Delaunay-Terk and their ground-breaking treatment of color (see fig. 3). Chagall began to execute paintings using vividly opposing colors inspired by Delaunay’s theory of Orphism in which he advocated for a move away from the monochromatic color palette favored by Picasso and Braque, and towards overlapping geometric planes of vivid color to create virtual painterly space. Chagall’s debt to Delaunay is clear in his work Paris de la fenêtre (see fig. 4) in which Chagall, as in the present work, is simultaneously looking forwards to his future in Paris, modernity in the city and revolutionary color theory, and backwards, at his home in Russia and the people and culture he left behind.

After four years in Paris, Chagall accepted an invitation from the German art dealer Herwarth Walden to exhibit a group of works in his gallery Der Sturm in Berlin. Chagall took 40 canvases and 160 gouaches, watercolors and drawings to be exhibited, including the large-scale oil of Moi et le village. Chagall continued his voyage on to Russia where he married Bella Rosenfeld and intended to return to Paris shortly thereafter with his new wife. With the outbreak of the First World War, Chagall and Bella were forced to remain in Russia and did not return to France until 1923. On their way to Paris that year, they stopped in Berlin to try to unsuccessfully recuperate the paintings left behind before the war. Finding many of his early works lost, the artist set out to paint them from his memories, typically reimagining large oils in the small paper format seen in the present work (one of the most striking examples to survive this moment). Here, Chagall captures the intense gaze between the goat and the figure and emphasizes the strong color palette, having clearly moved away from the Cubist aesthetic. Other examples of Chagall’s 1920s reinterpretations of his 1910s work can be found of iconic compositions such as L’Anniversaire and The Soldier Drinks (see. figs. 5-8).

Chagall’s exploration of the relationship with his roots in Russia was a recurring theme throughout his artistic career, however, the fact that he returned to the specific motif of Moi et le village demonstrates the particular importance this work took in the artist’s oeuvre. In addition to the present oil, he produced a number of other directly related compositions including an oil now in the Pola Museum in Japan and a work on paper bearing his dedication to Hilla Rebay now at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. However, the intensity and vibrancy of colors in the present work are unsurpassed (see figs. 9 & 10).

Artist

Marc Chagall