Description

Poster for an exhibition of engravings at the National Library of Paris.

In our communal lodgings, with the laborers and fruit vendors who are my neighbors, I have no choice but to lie on the bed and, turning to myself, reflect on myself. What else? Dreams overwhelm me. A square, empty room. In one corner, a single bed, and me on top of it.

It is dark.

Suddenly the ceiling opens and a winged creature descends noisily, filling the room with movement and clouds.

A murmur of wings brushing against each other.

I think: an angel! I cannot open my eyes; it is too bright, too luminous. After searching everywhere, it rises and passes through the skylight, taking all the light and the blue sky with it.

It grows dark again. I wake up. My painting, The Apparition, evokes this dream. Marc Chagall. A similar work, which shows the recurring theme of apparition in Chagall’s work, can be found at Tate Modern in London. Like many of Chagall’s prints from the early 1920s, The Vision is based on an earlier work dating from 1917. After Chagall moved to Paris in 1923, he created new versions of many of the works he had made in Russia. The Vision shows the young painter at his easel being visited by an angel. Chagall’s paintings were often inspired by his dreams, and the winged angel is just one of the many fabulous beings that populate his compositions. Chagall recognized that through his art he could escape into his imagination. He later said that painting “appeared to him like a window through which I could fly into another world.”