.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
In the last third of his life, Marc Chagall expanded his artistic activity into public works, such as his monumental stained glass windows for the synagogue of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the United Nations headquarters in New York. Despite this period of increased contact with his patrons, he largely closed himself off in his house at Saint-Paul-de-Vence near Nice, where he had settled in 1950. Chagall painted Le paysan allongé in this secluded environment, revisiting earlier themes from the personal iconography that the artist developed in the years before World War I, which continued to serve him throughout his long career.
Chagall often described himself as an observer of everyday Russian Judaism, yet his recurring tropes take inspiration from diverse sources such as mystical and folkloric traditions, popular theater, politics, and the Bible. Chagall stated in a 1944 interview, "I am against the terms 'fantasy' and 'symbolism' in themselves. All our interior world is reality- and that perhaps more so than our apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical, 'fantasy,' fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature" (quoted in J. J. Sweeney, Marc Chagall, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, 1946, p. 63). Similarly, the artist selectively employed the strategies of avant-garde movements including Cubism and Fauvism to further his own mode of artistic representation. Addressing the multicultural aspect of Chagall's work, Benjamin Harshav has stated: "Chagall had not one single cultural and ethnic consciousness or artistic style, but a cluster of identities that were mutually exclusive yet complementary in his own mental world" (Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, CA, 2003, pp. 24-25).
The present painting illustrates some of Chagall's most cherished themes. The reclining figure appears in earlier works such as Le poète allongé of 1915. The poet, like the clown, acrobat, or musician, was an important figure of self-identification for Chagall. In the present work, the reclining peasant observes the moonlit concent of a haloed dancing woman, a fiddler, a musician playing a shofar-like instrument, and a red goat with a yellow violin. The peasant's averted gaze indicates a visionary experience; the Hasidim of Chagall's childhood believed it possible to achieve communion with God through music and dance. In addition, the expressive configuration of the present work echoes Henri Rousseau's famous Le rêve, 1910 (fig. 1). Rousseau, like Chagall, was venerated by the Surrealists. Harshav has observed: "Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed Chagall's art 'Surnaturalism' even before he coined the term Surrealism. Yet there was a cardinal difference between them: the Surrealists claimed that they created from their subconscious, from their dream world whereas Chagall, producing similar paintings, had a need to claim that all this was real, that he 'really' experienced those strange images. Instead of describing his paintings as a private mythology, he mythologized his own biography. Furthermore, his paintings could be seen as an attempt to understand himself and go back to his roots, to show the world where he came from, the Jewish and Russian provincial life (with shifting emphases between the two)" (Marc Chagall and His Times, Stanford, CA, 2004, pp.70-71).
(fig. 1) Henri Rousseau, Le rêve, 1910. Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE 24758277
Chagall often described himself as an observer of everyday Russian Judaism, yet his recurring tropes take inspiration from diverse sources such as mystical and folkloric traditions, popular theater, politics, and the Bible. Chagall stated in a 1944 interview, "I am against the terms 'fantasy' and 'symbolism' in themselves. All our interior world is reality- and that perhaps more so than our apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical, 'fantasy,' fairy tale, or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature" (quoted in J. J. Sweeney, Marc Chagall, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, 1946, p. 63). Similarly, the artist selectively employed the strategies of avant-garde movements including Cubism and Fauvism to further his own mode of artistic representation. Addressing the multicultural aspect of Chagall's work, Benjamin Harshav has stated: "Chagall had not one single cultural and ethnic consciousness or artistic style, but a cluster of identities that were mutually exclusive yet complementary in his own mental world" (Marc Chagall on Art and Culture, Stanford, CA, 2003, pp. 24-25).
The present painting illustrates some of Chagall's most cherished themes. The reclining figure appears in earlier works such as Le poète allongé of 1915. The poet, like the clown, acrobat, or musician, was an important figure of self-identification for Chagall. In the present work, the reclining peasant observes the moonlit concent of a haloed dancing woman, a fiddler, a musician playing a shofar-like instrument, and a red goat with a yellow violin. The peasant's averted gaze indicates a visionary experience; the Hasidim of Chagall's childhood believed it possible to achieve communion with God through music and dance. In addition, the expressive configuration of the present work echoes Henri Rousseau's famous Le rêve, 1910 (fig. 1). Rousseau, like Chagall, was venerated by the Surrealists. Harshav has observed: "Guillaume Apollinaire dubbed Chagall's art 'Surnaturalism' even before he coined the term Surrealism. Yet there was a cardinal difference between them: the Surrealists claimed that they created from their subconscious, from their dream world whereas Chagall, producing similar paintings, had a need to claim that all this was real, that he 'really' experienced those strange images. Instead of describing his paintings as a private mythology, he mythologized his own biography. Furthermore, his paintings could be seen as an attempt to understand himself and go back to his roots, to show the world where he came from, the Jewish and Russian provincial life (with shifting emphases between the two)" (Marc Chagall and His Times, Stanford, CA, 2004, pp.70-71).
(fig. 1) Henri Rousseau, Le rêve, 1910. Museum of Modern Art, New York. BARCODE 24758277