In I and the Village Marc Chagall combines the innovations of cubism, expressionism and surrealism. Cubism provides him with the geometric construction of his painting which, as Werner Haftmann states, "binds the whole construction firmly inside the picture rectangle so that, although in many places the edges of the picture cut through objective details, these do not point outside the picture margins but remain structural elements of the internal design. Nothing projects outside of the self-contained unity of the ornamental surface."[i]
In other words, Chagall’s composition is designed to reconcile the fragments that it will contain. The same is true of Chagall’s use of colour as Haftmann, again, helpfully explains: "since the colours are in tone groupings ... colour loses its material quality and becomes the bearer of an independent, immaterial colour-light. ... it is a pure inner picture light, created out of the light values of the individual colours and their interaction. It is split into facets in the spatial and ornamental network of the picture surface, and shines unorientated out of the entire surface of the painting. The colour alone is the source of all light."[ii]
Chagall’s imagery anticipates surrealism by combining personal, folk and religious imagery in unusual juxtapositions. In I and the Village, an animal and a green faced man gaze lovingly into each others eyes as the man offers the animal a glowing branch that scatters light. Above them the green, yellow, blue and red houses of a Russian village turn onto their roofs while a man and woman move up the main street, the man upright, the woman upside down. Colour and pattern emphasise the link between the large human face and the animal face. The eyes are linked by a line that cuts across the other diagonals. The tender green filling the human face highlights the loving gaze directed at the animal. Together they emphasise the emotional unity underlying the picture, that all these objects and images are loved by the painter.
The images can be seen as bringing together four sections of creation; the human, the animal, plant life and civilisation. They bring together the strange (the topsy turvey houses and people) with the ordinary (a man walking the village street, a woman milking a cow). They connect a person with a community, the 'I' of the title with the people and animals who populate the village. These, together, may also hint at other unities; those of family (with the animal possibly symbolising a mother figure) and the village, and all within it, caught up in a parent-child relationship. Or where the tender love expressed towards all these disparate objects is speaking of a spiritual unity with God expressed in every aspect of His creation and all linked and made worthy of love as a result.
Chagall is also uniting some of the great artistic movements of his day. In his composition he makes use of the discoveries of cubism, in his colours the freedoms of fauvism and expressionism and, in his imagery he anticipates aspects of surrealism. His originality and innovations lie in the fact that, when all around him artists were dismantling the jigsaw of art in order to explore to their limits component pieces such as perspective, structure and colour, he was intent on fitting the pieces of the puzzle back together in new and imaginative configurations. Chagall has created a unity at every level within his painting so that both the medium and the content proclaim the possibility of reconciliation.
[i] W. Haftmann, Chagall, Thames & Hudson, 1985, p.52.
[ii] Ibid.
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