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Lot Essay
Executed in the defining year of 1911, Etude pour 'Moi et le village' is a jewel-toned gouache study for what is widely regarded as Marc Chagall’s defining first masterpiece of the same name (Meyer, pp. 162-163; The Museum of Modern Art, New York). In early 1910, the twenty-year old artist left his home in the small town of Vitebsk, venturing westward by train to Paris, a city that would come to represent freedom and light in his imagination. Just two days after his arrival in the French capital, Chagall visited the Salon des Indépendants, where he was immersed in the latest developments of the contemporary avant-garde art scene, discovering the work of the Fauves, the Cubists and the Orphists for the first time.
Shortly thereafter, he took up a studio in bohemian Montparnasse in the legendary building known as La Ruche (the ‘bee-hive’), where some of the most innovative painters, poets and sculptors of the day congregated—Chaïm Soutine, Alexander Archipenko, Amedeo Modigliani, Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger all held studios here at this time. Inspired by this atmosphere of rich cultural exchange and innovation, Chagall entered a phase of intense creativity and imaginative growth, as he synthesized different elements of the most radical styles of the period with his own uniquely fantastical subject matter.
Despite Chagall’s enthusiasm for Paris, nearly all of his works from these seminal years are tinged by memories and experiences from the artist’s youth in Vitebsk. Following a brief period during which he revisited several of his earlier pre-Paris compositions, exploring their subjects through a new radical vocabulary of color and form, he embarked upon a series of important gouaches and watercolors that reveal the new direction of his creative spirit. Filled with a distinct spontaneity and freedom of execution, these jewel-toned works chart the rapid development of Chagall’s style at this time. As Franz Meyer has observed, these works ‘express, in all its breadth, the tempestuous flood of invention that flows through Chagall’s Paris period… In the hot rhythm of the motifs, alternately isolated and combined, and in the interplay of the loosely sketched or strongly accentuated forms we can feel the essential pulse of his art’ (Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 131).
Etude pour 'Moi et le village' is one of the earliest in a series of sketches, gouaches and watercolors that both anticipate and later revisit the titular final oil painting. Across a rich surface of brilliantly-hued gouache, a green-faced figure and goat meet tête à tête in a moment of amiable confrontation. As if the very embodiment of a memory, this purely Chagallian vision shimmers across its carefully delineated and splintered composition, undoubtedly inspired by the artist’s Cubist contemporaries. Of the oil painting, Franz Meyer remarks that Moi et le village “is at once the term and peak of Chagall’s “geometrical” series” in not only its form, but is equally “from the symbolic viewpoint, too, one of the richest and most impressive formulations of that period” (ibid., p. 162).
Vignettes and motifs flash in and out of focus both within the background and the goat himself, in whose head the image of a woman milking the animal appears. A tree rises to meet the two protagonists from the man’s outstretched hand and behind them, under the emerald veil of the night sky, the town of Vitebsk appears, populated by an inverted violinist and accompanying scythe-bearing figure. Together, these glimpses seem to illustrate and rejoice in the cycle of life and, what’s more, the enduring power of memory during a time of profound change for Chagall.
At the heart of the artist’s early visual idiom, this dazzling otherworldly vision would return throughout his oeuvre of the following decade. It is, however, within the earliest conceptions of the image that the emotion is at its most palpable and the memory most visceral. Although Chagall would move away from the fractured compositions of the Cubists and Orphists, he would carry with him the exploration of lyrical color and expressive form that would remain hallmarks of his prolific oeuvre until the end of his life.
Shortly thereafter, he took up a studio in bohemian Montparnasse in the legendary building known as La Ruche (the ‘bee-hive’), where some of the most innovative painters, poets and sculptors of the day congregated—Chaïm Soutine, Alexander Archipenko, Amedeo Modigliani, Ossip Zadkine and Fernand Léger all held studios here at this time. Inspired by this atmosphere of rich cultural exchange and innovation, Chagall entered a phase of intense creativity and imaginative growth, as he synthesized different elements of the most radical styles of the period with his own uniquely fantastical subject matter.
Despite Chagall’s enthusiasm for Paris, nearly all of his works from these seminal years are tinged by memories and experiences from the artist’s youth in Vitebsk. Following a brief period during which he revisited several of his earlier pre-Paris compositions, exploring their subjects through a new radical vocabulary of color and form, he embarked upon a series of important gouaches and watercolors that reveal the new direction of his creative spirit. Filled with a distinct spontaneity and freedom of execution, these jewel-toned works chart the rapid development of Chagall’s style at this time. As Franz Meyer has observed, these works ‘express, in all its breadth, the tempestuous flood of invention that flows through Chagall’s Paris period… In the hot rhythm of the motifs, alternately isolated and combined, and in the interplay of the loosely sketched or strongly accentuated forms we can feel the essential pulse of his art’ (Marc Chagall: Life and Work, New York, 1964, p. 131).
Etude pour 'Moi et le village' is one of the earliest in a series of sketches, gouaches and watercolors that both anticipate and later revisit the titular final oil painting. Across a rich surface of brilliantly-hued gouache, a green-faced figure and goat meet tête à tête in a moment of amiable confrontation. As if the very embodiment of a memory, this purely Chagallian vision shimmers across its carefully delineated and splintered composition, undoubtedly inspired by the artist’s Cubist contemporaries. Of the oil painting, Franz Meyer remarks that Moi et le village “is at once the term and peak of Chagall’s “geometrical” series” in not only its form, but is equally “from the symbolic viewpoint, too, one of the richest and most impressive formulations of that period” (ibid., p. 162).
Vignettes and motifs flash in and out of focus both within the background and the goat himself, in whose head the image of a woman milking the animal appears. A tree rises to meet the two protagonists from the man’s outstretched hand and behind them, under the emerald veil of the night sky, the town of Vitebsk appears, populated by an inverted violinist and accompanying scythe-bearing figure. Together, these glimpses seem to illustrate and rejoice in the cycle of life and, what’s more, the enduring power of memory during a time of profound change for Chagall.
At the heart of the artist’s early visual idiom, this dazzling otherworldly vision would return throughout his oeuvre of the following decade. It is, however, within the earliest conceptions of the image that the emotion is at its most palpable and the memory most visceral. Although Chagall would move away from the fractured compositions of the Cubists and Orphists, he would carry with him the exploration of lyrical color and expressive form that would remain hallmarks of his prolific oeuvre until the end of his life.