Painting Collection


Marc Chagall

Composition

 

(1887—1985)
Composition
1912
oil on canvas
27 x 22 inches

Marc Chagall composed this picture in the middle of a four-year stay in Paris, after leaving his native Russia. In France, he was exposed to developing artistic movements and experimented with the saturated colors and flattened figures of the Fauves and the fractured spaces of the Cubists. As he established his own approach, Chagall began blending experimental spaces and fantastical imagery, drawn from personal memories, nostalgic objects, and Russian culture. Chagall filled Composition with elements inspired by Russian folklore that circulate around the painting in an amorphous space, filled with bursts of thickly-applied color. Among the subjects in this work, the artist painted a lone figure in a decorative hood, who emerges from the side of the canvas, clutching an outspread fan awash with color. She is flanked by tree-like forms, decorative dishware, and a hairbrush, all bisected by sharp lines and bright colors creating a kaleidoscopic effect.

Chagall painted Composition in his studio at La Ruche (or “the beehive”), a cylindrical building in Montparnasse with a honeycomb network of inexpensive spaces that attracted a community of immigrants. Chagall later wrote: “In those studios lived the artistic Bohemia of every land.” In this painting, Chagall pulls from these various artistic movements around him, but with an attention to Russian imagery entirely his own.

—Danielle O'Steen, Ph.D.


 

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