I and the Village
Project
Marc Chagall
Volunteer:
Date:
Grade Level: 5th Grade
Artist: Marc Chagall
Print Sculpture: I and the Village
Art Vocabulary: Surrealistic
Surrealism
Mosaic
I The Artist:  Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall, b. 1887, Vitebsk, Russia; d. 1985, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.
Marc Chagall was born July 7, 1887, in Vitebsk, Russia. From 1907 to 1910, he studied in Saint Petersburg, at the Imperial Society for the Protection of the Arts and later with Léon Bakst. In 1910, he moved to Paris, where he associated with Guillaume Apollinaire and Robert Delaunay and encountered Fauvism and Cubism. He participated in the Salon des Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne in 1912. His first solo show was held in 1914 at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin.
Chagall visited Russia in 1914, and was prevented from returning to Paris by the outbreak of war. He settled in Vitebsk, where he was appointed Commissar for Art in 1918. He founded the Vitebsk Popular Art School and directed it until disagreements with the Suprematists resulted in his resignation in 1920. He moved to Moscow and executed his first stage designs for the State Jewish Chamber Theater there. After a sojourn in Berlin, Chagall returned to Paris in 1923 and met Ambroise Vollard. His first retrospective took place in 1924 at the Galerie Barbazanges-Hodebert, Paris. During the 1930s, he traveled to Palestine, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, and Italy. In 1933, the Kunsthalle Basel held a major retrospective of his work.
During World War II, Chagall fled to the United States. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, gave him a retrospective in 1946. He settled permanently in France in 1948 and exhibited in Paris, Amsterdam, and London. During 1951, he visited Israel and executed his first sculptures. The following year, the artist traveled in Greece and Italy. During the 1960s, Chagall continued to travel widely, often in association with large-scale commissions he received. Among these were windows for the synagogue of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, Jerusalem, installed in 1962; a ceiling for the Paris Opéra, installed in 1964; a window for the United Nations building, New York, installed in 1964; murals for the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, installed in 1967; and windows for the cathedral in Metz, France, installed in 1968. An exhibition of the artist’s work from 1967 to 1977 was held at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, in 1977–78, and a major retrospective was held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1985. Chagall died March 28, 1985, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.
II. Composition of Picture
Shapes, colors, feelings
I and the Village is one of Shapes, colors, feelings’s most original paintings. It is very representative of the artist’s work during the early years of his stay in Paris. Several aspects of the painting are worth discussing.
A. The painting belongs to a long honored tradition of Russian folk paintings.
Could the village figured in the painting be Riverside? Why not?
Chagall is obviously representing a peasants’ village, not a suburban community. Farm animals (cows) figure prominently; the people in the picture are working peasants; their clothes (the long loose blouse and the caps on the mens’ heads) are typical of Russian country people at the turn of the 20th century. Chagall said that when he came to Paris in 1910, he still had "some Russian soil clinging to his shoes" (A Concise History of Modern Painting, p.124). Later, he also said that "there is not a centimeter of my work that does not express nostalgia for my native land." Of great importance to Chagall were the places where he lived and absorbed his personal symbols; Those places included the village of Vitebsk where he grew up; Paris, where he settled for a long time after finding congenial artist friends; and finally St. Paul de Vence, in the South of France, where he discovered the light of the Mediterranean countries.
Ask the children to point out other elements which are reminiscent of Russian country life at the beginning of the 20th Century.
For example, the Byzantine rite church with its onion dome, the brightly colored isbas of the peasants.
Point out that bright colors and simple, stylized lines are characteristic of Russian folk art.
B. The painting has a dream-like quality reminiscent of surrealist poetry.
What is unusual, strange, dream-like in the painting?
Many elements are suggestive of dreams:
  • The different scales of the objects and creatures figured in the picture. Note the small cow inside the head of the larger cow, the man’s face on the right, much larger than the other characters in the picture, the flowers at the bottom, larger houses.
  • The spatial relations of characters and objects. Point out the floating figures, the upside-down woman at the top of the picture. There is no gravity to pull down the figures. The weightlessness of the small characters is very typical of Chagall’s paintings and contrasts with the massive solidity of the two main figures.
  • The illogical assemblage of disparate elements, such as the necklace around the cow’s neck.
  • The unexpected colors, such as the green face on the right.
C. The painting provides a good instance of Chagall’s intense religious feelings and mysticism. Chagall was Jewish, but not in any dogmatic or orthodox way. His faith in God was rooted in his belief in the beauty and essential goodness of the creation and in his optimistic insistence on the all-encompassing nature of love. Finally, his religious faith was inseparable from his compassion for humanity. His imagination as an artist was never limited by Jewish symbols. Indeed, religious indications in I and the Village include the church at the top of the picture and the cross around the neck of the green-faced man who is probably a self-portrait of Chagall himself.
Chagall’s mysticism is made manifest in the overall composition of the painting.
What is the focal point of the painting, that is, the point towards which our eyes are drawn?
It is almost exactly the geometrical center of the canvas. It is the intersection of the straight lines which form three triangles, the coming together of three different color planes: the triangle with the cow’s head on the left, the triangle which contains the man’s head on the right, and the triangle of plants and flowers at the bottom. Note that the lines which join the eyes of the cow and the man and the focal point form another triangle. The painting starts with a series of adjoining triangles and interlocking circles, which remind us of the ripples created by dropping an object on the surface of water. The composition of the painting which appears very haphazard and nonsensical at first, is in fact very intricate and carefully thought out. And the picture can be enjoyed on different levels: As a colorful assemblage of shapes; as an historical vignette; as a figuration of very personal souvenirs and associations; and finally as a statement on the place of man in the creation.
What do the three triangles in the picture represent: The cow’s head, the man’s face and the plant and flowers?
Why are they juxtaposed, put side by side, and united by means of the red and white circle?
Do they represent the animal, human, and vegetable worlds, the three levels of Creation? Are they made to come together to suggest the harmony that must exist between man, animals, and their natural environment in order for God’s purpose to be fulfilled?
Is God the point of intersection of these three worlds, the focal point of the picture? Are all the creatures and objects in the "village" defined by their relationships to God? Is Chagall’s village our village, too? A microcosm of the world?
What are the emotional connotations of values of the colors used in the painting?
Red suggests passion, intensity, warmth.
White is the color of purity, simplicity, integrity. The cow is a familiar creature in Chagall’s paintings, and always a positive force.
Green is the color of hallucination for Chagall. The man on the right of the picture is illuminated by a force from within.
III. Artist’s Materials and/or Techniques
Oil, Water, Mosaics
IV. Activity
Using the picture "View of Paris" describe dreams they have had and then draw descriptive picture, put together in a book and let each child bring the book home.
Make a mosaic:  Example
This activity is a good preparation for the fifth graders who will go on a field trip to see Chagall’s Four Seasons mosaic downtown Chicago at the end of the school year. The theme could be the upcoming holidays.
Each student can assemble his own mosaic on a predetermined theme or the class can be divided into four or five groups working with different assigned colors and designs. The resulting mosaics could be assembled into a whole on a bulletin board.
Designs borrowed from Chagall’s painting (cow’s head and body, man’s head, tree or plant, houses, etc.) could be enlarged and used as themes. Other designs would work equally well. Have the children reconstruct some favorite element of their "village": a dog, a raccoon, a school building or their houses, the river, etc.
For tiles, use small pieces of contact paper of different shapes (triangles, squares, rectangles, etc.) that can be juxtaposed or overlapped, or pieces of construction paper, stiff fabric, felt, cardboard (for example, pieces of cereal boxes). Blue the pieces on a stiff enough surface (heavy construction paper or cardboard or posterboard). Use many different colors, different textures.
Precut the pieces to be used: It will save a lot of time and give the children more leisure to think about their designs.
Write a surrealist poem
Let this be an exercise in spontaneous (or nearly spontaneous) creation by the whole class.
The article on Chagall and Surrealism A Concise History of Modern Painting has some good suggestions.
Start the activity by defining a theme for the exercise: Maybe the poem could be about Chagall’s painting itself. Make lists of vocabulary related to different aspects of the painting (example: words used to define dreams, such as evanescent, intangible, elusive, etc. Words used to define the spatial relationships of the creatures and objects in the painting; or the colors, the individual objects and shapes and their relative positions, etc.) Then ask each child in turn to come up with one statement about the painting. Try to re-arrange the final product into a whole with its own rhythm and balance.
Draw a dream
Let each child draw a picture of one of his dreams.
Or let each child draw a picture of a cow’s dream. Do animals have dreams or fantasies? What would a cow’s fantasy look like?
Start off with:

 

ONCE, I HAD A DREAM ABOUT:

 

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