拍品專文
One of the major motifs of 1939-40, which since then reappears again and again is the self-portrait at the easel...The painter's dual face seems to express the ambivalence of artistic creation, at once inner vision and outer realization, deliberate action and casual inactivity. This ambivalence reappears in another shape in the motifs of a gouache heightened with pastel of 1940 (cf.cat.688). Here the angel is urgently exhorting the painter, who is apparently anxious to elude the "order"; on the canvas a cow, its head stretched skyward, calls the name "Chagall" as though the picture that thus bears witness to the painter and renders itself independent of him.
The motif of this gouache has undergone a curious transformation in another painted at the same time. Here the painter standing before the easel in a similar posture with similar gestures has become Christ on the cross; in the easel picture the cow is replaced by an Entombment and instead of the angel, God's hands appear in the sky in a gesture of benediction. Lower down at the foot of the cross, candles burn in a candlestick and a female centaur rolls on the ground. Here Christ is no longer a suprapersonal symbol of pain mirroring man's diverse destiny. Instead he is personalized as the symbol of the intensification and deepening of the pain of every single individual, represented as the pain felt by the painter himself through his sympathy with the fate of his nation and the horrors of war, and at the same time the symbol of the pain inherent in artistic creation. In fact, since the war Chagall has always had a more intense perception of the ambivalence of creation as such. Though it brings joy and satisfaction it always involves dedication and self-sacrifice.' (Meyer, op.cit. p.435).
The motif of this gouache has undergone a curious transformation in another painted at the same time. Here the painter standing before the easel in a similar posture with similar gestures has become Christ on the cross; in the easel picture the cow is replaced by an Entombment and instead of the angel, God's hands appear in the sky in a gesture of benediction. Lower down at the foot of the cross, candles burn in a candlestick and a female centaur rolls on the ground. Here Christ is no longer a suprapersonal symbol of pain mirroring man's diverse destiny. Instead he is personalized as the symbol of the intensification and deepening of the pain of every single individual, represented as the pain felt by the painter himself through his sympathy with the fate of his nation and the horrors of war, and at the same time the symbol of the pain inherent in artistic creation. In fact, since the war Chagall has always had a more intense perception of the ambivalence of creation as such. Though it brings joy and satisfaction it always involves dedication and self-sacrifice.' (Meyer, op.cit. p.435).