Marc Chagall

Gallery Guy Pieters, Knokke-le-Zoute
Acquired from the above by the present owner circa 1990

Executed on blue laid paper, not laid down. All four edges are deckled and the sheet is very slightly undulating due to the application of medium. This work is in overall very good condition.
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By the 1950s, when Personnage dans le village was executed, Chagall's aesthetic vocabulary was so well established that he was able to tackle a wide variety of subjects on a single canvas. This beautiful work in gouache and ink, with its combination of folkloric and personal symbolism, encompasses many of the themes for which the artist is renowned: farm animals, floating figures and a townscape recalling the artist’s childhood home of Vitebsk. Rather than representing a rational arrangement of different elements within the space of the painting, Personnage dans le village is a held together by an internal principle rather than by a logical spatial relationship. With its fanciful, dream-like composition, the painting becomes an expression of the artist's intensely personal universe rather than an objective projection of the outside world. 'That he is a Russian may account for his surprising Byzantine colour,' the art historian and curator Katherine Kuh once remarked, 'but scarcely explains his indifference to normal laws of gravity' (Katherine Kuh, 'The Pleasure of Chagall's Paintings', in Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 149).

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. As such, Chagall's paintings defy symbolic meaning and categorisation. In particular, his dreamscapes resist interpretation despite the ubiquity of repeated pictorial symbols; through repetition they become 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 Susan Compton, Chagall, London, 1985, 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.