I and the Village
Marc Chagall (1887 to 1985) · 1911
A green faced man and a white cow gaze into each other's eyes across the canvas, and a thin line runs between their pupils to show that they understand one another. On the cow's cheek a milkmaid milks a smaller cow; above, a peasant with a scythe walks towards a woman who floats upside down; behind them a row of wooden houses and an Orthodox church sit on a hill, two of the houses also upside down. In the man's hand a small flowering branch glows against the dark. The whole thing is arranged inside overlapping circles like a stained glass window.
Chagall painted it in Paris in 1911, the year after leaving his home town of Vitebsk in what is now Belarus, and it is a dream of the Hasidic village he had grown up in. He had just discovered Cubism, and you can see it in the way the picture is cut into wedges and circles, but he used those devices for memory and feeling rather than analysis. Look at the transparent planes of colour that let one form show through another, and at the way red, green and blue are set against each other at full strength.
The title was suggested by the poet Blaise Cendrars, Chagall's friend in Paris. MoMA bought the painting in 1945 through the Mrs Simon Guggenheim Fund, when Chagall was living in New York as a refugee from the war. It has become the image most people picture when they hear his name. Look for the tiny figure of a man on the cow's head, the beads around the green face and the circle of the moon that ties the two heads together.
Did You Know? The line linking the eyes of the man and the cow was Chagall's way of showing that peasants and animals in his village depended on each other completely.
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