Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was born in Vitebsk, Belarus, and raised in a large family. His father worked in a fish warehouse, and his mother kept a small shop. Chagall began his formal artistic training in St. Petersburg, Russia, and later went to Paris, the center of the art world at the turn of the century.
Chagall admired the many new artistic styles developing in Paris. Expressionism, a late-1800s movement, conveyed intense feelings. In Symbolism, another late 19th-century-movement, artists valued the mystery of ideas and the artist’s inner subjectivity above an object’s physical reality. Fauvism arose in 1905, using non-natural colors to show emotion. Chagall synthesized these movements and developed a unique style expressing his Jewish experience. He favored a narrative, figurative tradition and never constrained himself to a single style.
I and the Village is an oil painting that depicts Chagall’s memories of his life growing up in a village in Belarus, then part of the Russian empire. It was a Hasidic Jewish community with an agricultural way of life. Violent pogroms, or organized killings, ravaged the villages, but this lyrical depiction shows Chagall’s nostalgia for his youth, untarnished by violence or evil.
The underlying circular geometry refers to the sun, moon, and earth. Some interpret the circles as celestial orbits, with an eclipsed moon in the lower left. Chagall divides the painting into quarters, echoing the seasons or the four directions. The work has a strong diagonal orientation with an inherent sense of movement and instability. The geometric planes are reminiscent of Cubism and align with the contours of the man’s face (along his nose and the line from nose to mouth). The contrasting, non-naturalistic color and distinctive contours also reference Cubism.
Instead of using the planes to depict multiple views of the same object as in the Cubist style, Chagall uses the space to create a dreamlike, artificial world. Elements of this world seem to follow their own rules; people and houses exist in opposing orientations and inexplicable juxtapositions of scale.
The figures float in hierarchical scale, with the most important figures being the largest. The collage of overlapping memories creates a whimsical assemblage.
Chagall explained, “For me, a painting is a surface covered with representations of things . . . in which logic and illustration have no importance.”
A dotted line links the man and the animal (perhaps a cow, goat, or sheep), showing their interdependence. The man holds a flowering branch, evoking a mystical tree of life.
During his life, Chagall lived in France, Russia, and other places worldwide, including New York City during World War II.