Marc Chagall

Private Collection (acquired in the late 1970s)
Thence by descent to the present owner

Zurich, Kuntshaus, Chagall, 1967
New York, Pierre Matisse Gallery, Chagall, Gouaches 1957-1968, 1968, no. 7, illustrated in the catalogue

Werner Haftmann, Marc Chagall, Gouachen, Zeichnungen, Aquarelle, Cologne, 1975, illustrated pl. 74

Executed on a thick japan paper, not laid down, attached to the mount at the upper two and the lower right corners and floating. All four edges are deckled. There are some fine lines of craquelure to some of the thicker pigments with some tiny associated paint losses, not at all visually distracting. The sheet is very slightly undulated in places, due to the thick application of medium. Otherwise this work is in overall very good condition. Colours: Overall fairly accurate, although the background is slightly lighter in the original when compared to the printed catalogue illustration.
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Village sous la neige is a quintessential example of Chagall's mastery in assembling an array of folkloric images in a dense and colourful composition. This work contains several of the most celebrated elements in the artist's pictorial iconography: symbols of his agrarian roots and domesticity and a landscape evoking the poor villages of his childhood home in Russia. Each figure is masterfully rendered through a matrix of intense colour and spatial experimentation that epitomized Chagall's work, reflecting his own very personal delight in the act of painting. Unlike the Surrealists who used painting to dramatize the confrontational and disturbing potential of the subconscious, Chagall found an affinity between painting and dreaming through which he was able to articulate the deepest desires of his heart: "Painting seemed to me like a window through which I could have taken flight toward another world" (quoted in Susan Compton, Chagall, London, 1985, p. 20).

As such, Chagall's paintings defy symbolic meaning and categorization. In particular, his dreamscapes resist interpretation despite the ubiquity of repeated pictorial symbols; through repetition they become both familiar and are manifestations of a rich and colourful imagination that can be understood not through intellect but through intuition. As the artist himself proclaimed: ‘For me a picture is a surface covered with representations of things (objects, animals, human beings) in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance. The visual effect of the composition is what is paramount’ (quoted in ibid., p. 21). This joy of creation and the artistic freedom of interpretation reflect Chagall's confidence in his style and technique and his deeply subjective approach to painting. With its fanciful, dream-like composition, the painting becomes an expression of the artist's internal universe rather than an objective projection of the outside world.