In his introduction to an exhibition of Chagall's late work at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, Pierre Schneider relayed some of the artist's ideas on his work. "Those familiar themes of which the fabric of Chagall's fantasy has long been woven, what do they mean to him now? - At bottom, for me, what one calls the subject is only another aspect of technique...They have ceased to function as signs, they are nothing more than indifferent materials - I often turn my pictures upside down to work on them without seeing what I am doing - It is as if the fantasy were corroded from within by the painting...I do anything, it is the voice that matters not what one sings."

Of Chagall's technique Schneider later writes, "Chagall often speaks of chemistry. That chemistry, it should be specified, is organic...At the beginning, the composition is worked out in one or several studies, then transferred onto canvas by means of a shape or rather a firm drawing. This is the dish which the painter has prepared and is offering to colour. The consumption which now begins is a seesaw struggle - My canvases are filled with little battles - that lends the picture its effervescence, its restlessness, its palpitation. It is completed when colour has consumed the drawing, in other works when the painting's work has devoured the painter's work." (P. Schneider, Marc Chagall, Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1979)