La fenêtre dans le ciel

Marc Chagall drew from the memories of his native Vitebsk and the traditions of its Hasidic community to create a highly personal lexicon. He called his symbols "the vital mark these early influences leave, as it were, on the handwriting of the artist" (J.J. Sweeney, "An Interview with Marc Chagall," Partisan Review, vol. XVI, no. 3, 1949) and he stressed that they should not be understood in terms of a decipherable pictorial text. La fenêtre dans le ciel is replete with these motifs: the lovers, the flying donkey (or Pegasus), the cock, the bouquet, the village, and the open window for example. These figures have no logical relationship to each other, but move within the pictorial space as in a dream in a way recalled by his wife Bella in her memoirs: "we both rise up above the room and begin to fly. We want to leave through the window. Outside the blue sky is calling us...We fly over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, the roofs, the yards, the churches spread out below us" (Lumieres Allumnées, Paris, 1974, pp. 258-259).

Chagall compared the color in a painting to musical notes calling it "the pulse of a work of art (that) goes through the eyes and remains within the soul" (quoted in F. Meyer, Chagall, Life and Work, p. 591). The prominence of blue, typical of Chagall's painting from this period, underscores the nocturnal or dreamlike quality of the present work. The vibrancy of this monochromatism is indebted to his work in leaded glass, a medium that occupied an increasingly important role in his oeuvre following his 1956 commission for the chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grace in Assy, France.