(Witebsk 1887–1985 Saint Paul de Vence)
Animal fabuleux: Fabel-Tier, 1926–27, signed, water-colour, gouache, pastels on brown paper laid down on cardboard, 66 x 51.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Sale Guillaume Campo, Antwerp, 25–27 April 1977 (label on the reverse)
Kunsthandel Lambert Tagenbosch, Heusden aan de Maas (1981)
Sale Christie’s London, 8 February 2001, lot 459
European Private Collection (acquired from the above by the present owner)

Exhibited:
Deurne, Gemeentemuseum De Wieger, Tentoonstelling Galerie Wiegersma, 1977

Marc Chagall does not sculpt objects, he sculpts his memories into a sensation of wonder and a suspended atmosphere which bursts into the everyday.
Thanks to commissions he received for stained glass from the 1960s onwards, Chagall developed a particular sensitivity to bright tones, making light and colour the key, most distinctive aspect of his work. “Should I paint the earth, the sky, my heart? The burning cities, my fleeing brothers? My eyes in tears. Where should I run and fly, to whom?”
His troubled life, his emigration to Paris in the 1910s and his experience as a Jewish refugee fleeing from the Nazis led his artistic career into a sort of ‘escape’ from the tragic real world into a dreamlike dimension full of colour and extraordinary beauty.
If on the one hand the simplicity of his pictorial line brings him very close to the early 20th-century Russian primitivism of Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, on the other hand, Paris allowed him to get closer on a chromatic level to the expressionism of the Fauves.
Animal fabuleux: Fable-Tier, represents a mythical creature from Chagall’s world of animals, childhood, and fairy tales. Here, the subject is so reduced to its essentiality that it is also reminiscent of the Lascaux cave paintings.
His naïve figures tend to blend in with the background thanks to a light outline that wcreates a “oneness” with the colour-stained background, thus becoming a free element independent of form.