At the beginning of 1912 Chagall made a fateful move. Leaving his rooms in Montparnasse, he relocated to outlying Vaugirard. It was a district of slaughterhouses and meat packers, an environment not at all alien to Chagall, who as a boy had spent summers visiting his maternal grandfather, a butcher in the town of Lyozno. In Vaugirard he took up lodging in a curious habitation known as La Ruche (The Beehive). This dodecagonal structure had served as the rotunda of the wine pavilion at the 1900 world's fair. An enterprising sculptor had purchased it, relocated it, and transformed it into studios for artists of humble means. Twelve studios were arranged on two floors around a central staircase. Living conditions were primitive, but circulating through this ramshackle structure were numerous figures on the threshold of fame--Léger, Amedeo Modigliani, Chaim Soutine, Ossip Zadkine, and Chagall, among others. La Ruche was to become as legendary a landmark in the second decade of the twentieth century as the Bateau Lavoir, occupied by Picasso and Braque, had been in its first.

It was here that Chagall met the poets and critics who were to be so crucial to his emergence from obscurity...Early in 1913 Apollinaire had arranged for the influential German dealer Herwarth Walden to visit Chagall's studio, and Walden was sufficiently impressed to include a few Chagall paintings in the Autumn Salon he held that year in his Sturm Gallery in Berlin. Recalling that visit, Walden's wife, Nell, later described Chagall as "a young man with curiously bright eyes and curly hair, who was idolized as an infant prodigy by his Parisian friends." (A. Kagan, Marc Chagall, New York, 1985, p. 23 and 33)