Descripción
Poster for an exhibition of prints at the National Library in Paris.
In our shared lodgings, with the workers and fruit sellers who are my neighbors, I have no choice but to lie down on my bed and, turning in on myself, reflect on myself. What else? I am plagued by dreams. 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 rustling of brushing wings.
I think: an angel! I cannot open my eyes, it is too bright, too light. After searching everywhere, it rises and passes through the roof window, taking with it all the light and the blue sky.
It is dark again. I wake up. My painting, The Apparition, evokes this dream.
Marc Chagall.
A similar work can be found at the Tate Modern in London, displaying the recurring theme of the apparition in Chagall’s works. Like many of Chagall’s etchings 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 many fabulous beings that populate his compositions. Chagall acknowledged that through his art he could escape into his imagination. He later said that the painting “appeared to him like a window through which he could fly into another world.”
