Lot Essay
The history of Modernism in painting, like most other intellectual movements of the 20th Century, was essentially an urban phenomenom. Even when the artist depicts a lower class, as in Picasso's Blue Period, these people are the product the social tensions inherent in modern city living. The small country farmer or rural laborer had no champion in this century as he did in Millet or Pissarro in the last. Consequently, there is no significant and sustained treatment and expression of rural values or folk mythology in progressive Modern European painting, with the notable exception of the work of Marc Chagall.
Chagall continually brings memories of the Russian villages of his childhood and young manhood into his work, and offers the viewer a primitivism very different from those borrowed from tribal cultures by other modernists. It is no doubt this nostalgia for a disappearing way of life that lends Chagall much of his enduring appeal, and allows many viewers to connect with a richly documented though increasingly inaccessible heritage.
As he does elsewhere, Chagall strives in the present painting to portray the memory of village life as he experienced it in the Jewish shtetl of pre-Holocaust Europe. The scene is stocked with typically Chagallian inhabitants: the young couple, the village musicians, and an oversize rooster. A flying figure carries a menorah. However, this idyllic scene opens up under an apocalyptic, blood-red sun, or perhaps an eclipse -- the figures at upper right appear to nibble away at the sun, as the figures at left attempt to wrest it from theme--a scene reminiscent of folk tales about lunar or solar eclipses.
Chagall's imagery, and the fantastic space it inhabits, appears at first to owe much to Surrealism. However, Chagall himself was never particularly close to the Surrealist movement, and was too much of an "independent" to subscribe to its agenda. His imagery was that of folk legends and mythology, as distilled through and enriched by a very personal sense of memory and imagination.
Chagall continually brings memories of the Russian villages of his childhood and young manhood into his work, and offers the viewer a primitivism very different from those borrowed from tribal cultures by other modernists. It is no doubt this nostalgia for a disappearing way of life that lends Chagall much of his enduring appeal, and allows many viewers to connect with a richly documented though increasingly inaccessible heritage.
As he does elsewhere, Chagall strives in the present painting to portray the memory of village life as he experienced it in the Jewish shtetl of pre-Holocaust Europe. The scene is stocked with typically Chagallian inhabitants: the young couple, the village musicians, and an oversize rooster. A flying figure carries a menorah. However, this idyllic scene opens up under an apocalyptic, blood-red sun, or perhaps an eclipse -- the figures at upper right appear to nibble away at the sun, as the figures at left attempt to wrest it from theme--a scene reminiscent of folk tales about lunar or solar eclipses.
Chagall's imagery, and the fantastic space it inhabits, appears at first to owe much to Surrealism. However, Chagall himself was never particularly close to the Surrealist movement, and was too much of an "independent" to subscribe to its agenda. His imagery was that of folk legends and mythology, as distilled through and enriched by a very personal sense of memory and imagination.