The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Marc Chagall · Moi et le village · oil on canvas, 192.1 by 151.4 cm, upright · a green-faced man in a cap and a white animal’s head face each other across the canvas, eye to eye, with a village above them and a great divided circle below · painted in Paris in 1911, dated and signed · The Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 1945 · the single canvas, scored as it stands
Mode
Memory painted as a world: a figure picture in the Paris idiom of 1911, faceted planes and a prismatic disc, filled with a remembered village and given memory’s own scale and orientation
Mythos
The oldest pact of the herding world, man and beast eye to eye as companion and provider; the village as a cosmos on one wheel, with sun or moon below and church above; a small tree of life held up in a man’s hand
Phase
Painted in Paris in 1911, the year after the painter came from Vitebsk; a village of the Pale remembered before the war and the revolution ended it
Presentation
One upright canvas in oil, 192.1 by 151.4 cm, about 2.91 square metres, in saturated reds, greens, whites and blues laid in faceted planes; the drawing deliberately naive
Register
Wonder and tenderness held at one level: a world freed of gravity, charged and nearly heraldic in its colour, gentle in its lift, without terror or conflict
Scale
One self, one animal, one village, its labour and its church, under a sun or moon, on nearly three square metres
Governing Proposition
A man’s head in profile at the right, its face green, and a white animal’s head at the left face each other across a canvas nearly two metres high, and a thin line runs from eye to eye. Inside the animal’s cheek a woman milks a cow; above, a village street stands partly on its head; below, a great circle in coloured segments sends arcs across the whole field. The wager of the canvas is that the newest syntax of Paris in 1911, the Cubist plane and the prismatic disc, built to exclude story and feeling, can be made to carry exactly what it excluded: a remembered village, its labour, its church, its animals, held by the physics of memory, where size is set by love and nothing need stay the right way up.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Marc Chagall was born in 1887 at Liozna, near Vitebsk, in the Pale of Settlement, and came to Paris in 1910. In 1911, in Paris, he painted this canvas: I and the Village, in English as The Museum of Modern Art gives it, Moi et le village in French. It is oil on canvas, 192.1 by 151.4 centimetres, upright, about 2.91 square metres, its height to its width as 1.27 to 1. It is dated 1911 and signed by the painter. The village it paints is the Vitebsk he had left, and he painted it from memory.
The canvas is filled to every edge. At the right is a man’s head in profile, facing left, its face green, wearing a cap; his eye and lips are large and drawn plainly. At the left, facing him, is a white animal’s head, most often called a cow, sometimes a goat, its eye level with his, and a thin line runs from the one eye to the other. In the animal’s cheek, small and transparent, a woman milks a cow. At the lower edge the man’s hand holds up a small flowering tree or sprig, its leaves lit.
Across the top runs a village street: houses, two of them upside down; a small Orthodox church; a man walking with a scythe on his shoulder, and before him a woman painted upside down. At the lower left a large circle divided into coloured segments, a sun or a moon in eclipse, sends arcs and diagonals across the whole field and cuts it into planes. The ground is saturated reds, greens, whites and blues, laid in faceted planes, and the two great heads stay dominant over all of it. The one canvas is the work scored. Chagall’s other Vitebsk pictures of 1911 to 1913, To Russia, Asses and Others, The Fiddler and Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, are its context.
Movement II
The picture’s axis is a line between two eyes. The man and the animal face each other at one level, at one size, and the line that joins them is the composition’s spine and its argument: the oldest pact of the herding world, the beast as companion and provider, given here as a bond of regard. Remove the animal and the man has nothing to look at, the line has no end, and the I of the title faces nothing. Remove the man and what is left is a farmyard. The core of the canvas resists subtraction.
Inside the animal’s head, small and transparent, a woman milks a cow. She is the canvas’s most exact idea. She makes the head a memory and not a beast: the milking happens inside the animal’s head because that is where it is kept. No single viewpoint allows it, and the picture does not ask for one. It shows the inside of a head with its contents, as it shows the animal as large as the self, because in memory the beloved animal is as large as the self. The canvas states that a person is made of a place.
The colour carries the same knowledge. The man’s face is green against a field of saturated red, and the animal’s head is white: complementaries held at full pitch across nearly three square metres without muddying, the planes cut cleanly and keyed so that the two heads command a crowded field. A green face is a face as felt, not as lit. The drawing is deliberately naive, and in the heads it is strong: the eye, the lip and the cap are set down with economy and authority. At the lower edge the man holds up the lit sprig, a small tree of life, and it is the quietest height in the picture.
Movement III
Above the heads the village stands partly on its head. Two houses are inverted; a woman is painted upside down before a man who walks with his scythe the right way up; a small Orthodox church stands among the houses. Recollection does not care which way up a house was. The canvas gives memory its own physics: scale set by love, gravity suspended, orientation indifferent, and each scene given its own space by the planes that cut the field. The knowledge, that memory has no single viewpoint, scale or direction, is known through a form that refuses all three.
In one perspective the same objects would be a farmyard with a man in it, an anecdote. Told in words, the simultaneity would be lost, because the picture gives the whole remembered village at once, as memory does. The two most distant elements, the geometric circle at the lower left and the inverted woman at the top, obey one law: everything is scaled, placed and turned by its weight in the remembering mind, and the geometry is the mind’s own grid laid over what it recalls. Around the two heads the village becomes a cosmos on one wheel, sun or moon below and church above, from the sky to a pail of milk.
The upper band is also where the canvas gives. The inverted woman, the scythe bearer and the upturned houses are a count rather than a structure: they could be more, fewer or rearranged, and the picture would know nearly the same thing. Their density is the accumulation of a remembering mind, which is the subject, but it is permitted more than compelled. Their figures are drawn summarily, at their own scale and finish, and sit somewhat apart from the two great heads; they are emblems of the folk village rather than its structure. The core is necessary and the margin is generous, and the canvas is at once whole and a little crowded.
Movement IV
The circle at the lower left is the Paris of 1911 inside the picture. Behind the canvas stands the avant-garde of 1910 and 1911: Cubism’s faceted planes, and the circular, prismatic colour of Delaunay, the most advanced painting there was, both programmatically emptied of story and sentiment. Chagall took the Cubist grid and the Orphist disc and filled them with what they excluded: memory, narration, a peasant village, feeling, a Jewish and Russian folk iconography drawn from the lubok, the popular print. The disc of Delaunay becomes a Vitebsk sun or moon. The newest syntax was made to speak the oldest material.
The stake was a young provincial emigrant’s, poor, among painters who called such content illustration, wagering on a path no school sanctioned. The means were borrowed, and the turn toward folk material had kin in Russia in the same years, in Larionov and Goncharova. What is his is the use: a grammar built to exclude narrative turned into a vehicle for it, and a village of the Pale set on equal terms at the centre of modern art. In its making the turn is sometimes incomplete. The faceting at times reads as a second idiom laid over the first, a style rather than a physics; some planes are decorative fill rather than structure; and the geometry is applied with less rigour than in its sources.
The disclosure is that remembered life has its own physics, and it is also a disclosure of exile: a Vitebsk Jew painting his village in Paris, in a Paris idiom, and the village returning whole and disordered. The canvas states it once, sweetly and not sharply. The larger part of what it gives is a state, tenderness and wonder and nostalgia, and its lift is the lift of a world set free of gravity: charged, nearly heraldic in colour at nearly two metres, gentle, and recurring at one level rather than rising. There is no terror in it. It is the sublime of the fairy tale, high in its kind and narrow in range.
Movement V
The Museum of Modern Art acquired the canvas in 1945 through the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund, and it has been on public view there since, among the museum’s most visited pictures, continuously reproduced and taught as the emblem of the painter and of his Paris years. Its form is whole. It has outlived its moment, the Paris of 1911 and the Vitebsk it recalls, destroyed in the war; and it has outlived the painter’s own later decades of softer repetition, which might have worn it down and have not. Its condition is not stated here, and nothing is charged against its fabric.
The canvas showed that the modern pictorial grammar could carry memory, story and the irrational logic of the dream before the Surrealists made that a programme. The dream picture of Surrealism, the folk modernism of Eastern European and Jewish art, and a broad later line of illustration and magic realist imagery stand in its debt. That reach belongs to the early Chagall as a whole, of which this is the emblem rather than the sole cause; the main lines of painting after 1911, abstraction, Dada and the constructive, went elsewhere; and part of the reach is to sweetened imagery. What the canvas leaves out is as plain as what it holds: the state, history, the pogroms and the coming war are nowhere in it, nor any conflict. It holds a whole remembered world without its cost.
The questions remain open after 115 years: who the I is, the painter or a peasant or both; whether the animal is a cow or a goat; whether the inverted woman means disorder, flight or memory’s indifference; how Jewish a picture is that holds a church and no synagogue; whether it is naive or a sophisticated pastiche of naivety. The desk sets it level with Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space at 8.2, which leads it on most axes and holds fewer orders of the world; a tenth above Kandinsky’s Composition VI at 8.1 and a tenth below Klimt’s The Kiss at 8.3; below Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie at 8.4 and Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory at 8.6, the dream picture this canvas anticipates; below Nabokov’s Speak, Memory at 8.6, the lost Russian home rebuilt in exile; and above Fragonard’s The Swing at 7.8. A man and an animal look at each other across a village, and the line between their eyes holds it together.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the configuration. The core resists subtraction. Remove the animal and the man has no one to look at, the line between the eyes has no end, and the title’s I faces nothing; remove the man and the picture is a farmyard. The milkmaid inside the animal’s head is required, because she makes the head a memory and not a beast. The great circle is required as the structure that cuts the field and holds the two heads in one wheel. What gives is the upper band: the inverted woman, the scythe bearer and the houses upside down are a count rather than a structure, and could be more, fewer or rearranged while the picture knew nearly the same thing. Their density is the accumulation of a remembering mind, permitted more than compelled, and that band holds the axis under 8.
Score: 7.9 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated: remembered life has its own physics. In memory the beloved animal is as large as the self, the milking happens inside the animal’s head because that is where it is kept, and the village stands on its head because recollection does not care which way up a house was. A person is made of a place, and the bond of man and beast in a peasant economy was a bond of regard, given as the line between two eyes. It is also a disclosure of exile: a Vitebsk Jew painting his village in Paris, in a Paris idiom, and the village returning whole and disordered. Held below the gate because the larger part of what the canvas gives is a state, tenderness, wonder and nostalgia, which ranks below a meaning, and its meaning is one proposition, sweetly and not sharply put.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The elevation is real and of one register: wonder, the lift of a world set free of gravity. The green face against the red and the white head opposite it, enormous and calm, give the canvas a charged, nearly heraldic presence at nearly two metres. The circle at the lower left, a sun or moon in eclipse, opens a cosmic note under the farmyard; the upside-down woman and houses give the small vertigo of flight; the lit sprig in the man’s hand is a quiet height of its own. But there is no terror and no grandeur of the kind a night sky gives, and the transport is gentle, recurring at a constant level rather than rising. It is the sublime of the fairy tale: high in its kind, narrow in range, and held under 8.
Score: 7.8 / 10
More built than evoked. The load-bearing structure is the face-to-face of man and animal, eye to eye on one line: the oldest pact of the herding world, the beast as companion and provider, set as the picture’s axis. Around it the village is drawn as a cosmos, with the sun or moon below and the church above, a whole world on one wheel, and the man holds up a small tree of life in its lit leaves. The structure is built from Russian and Jewish folk memory and the lubok, the popular print, not from a borrowed classical scheme, and the particulars stay particular: a cap, a scythe, a pail, a church, a green face. Held below the gate because the archetype of the lost home is summoned more than constructed, the figures of the upper band are emblems rather than structure, and the pattern is benign, without the cost that load-bearing myth usually carries.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the Paris avant-garde of 1910 and 1911: Cubism’s faceted planes and Delaunay’s circular, prismatic colour, the most advanced painting there was, both programmatically emptied of story and sentiment. The departure: Chagall took the Cubist grid and the Orphist disc and filled them with what they excluded, memory, narration, a peasant village, feeling, a Jewish and Russian folk iconography. Scale is set by love, gravity is suspended, the inside of a head is shown with its contents: the newest syntax made to speak the oldest material. The stake: a young provincial emigrant, poor, among painters who called such content illustration, wagering on a path no school sanctioned. Held at the gate rather than above it because the formal means were borrowed, and because the folk turn had kin in Russia, in Larionov and Goncharova, in the same years.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Largely. The knowledge is that memory has no single viewpoint, scale or direction, and it is known through a form that refuses all three: the milkmaid seen through the animal’s skin, houses inverted, the self and the beast at one size, the field cut into planes so that each scene has its own space. In one perspective the same objects would be a farmyard with a man in it, an anecdote; in words the simultaneity would be lost, because the picture gives the whole remembered village at once, as memory does. The colour is part of the knowing: a green face is a face as felt, not as lit. Held below the top because the Cubist faceting is at times a container for the content rather than its instrument: the planes divide the field more than they think.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: 115 years, and a reading that keeps returning. Who the I is: the painter, a peasant, or both. Whether the animal is a cow or a goat, and what follows. Whether the inverted woman is a sign of disorder, of flight, or simply memory’s indifference to orientation. How Jewish the picture is, with a church and no synagogue, and what that says of the Vitebsk the painter carried. Whether it is naive or a sophisticated pastiche of naivety; whether its debt to Cubism is a debt or a theft. The surface yields detail on return: the transparencies, the line between the eyes, the sprig. Held below 8.5 because the central meaning is agreed, and much of the literature concerns the painter’s life and myth rather than depths in this canvas.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Published, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: the canvas showed that the modern pictorial grammar could carry memory, story and the irrational logic of the dream, before the Surrealists made that a programme, and that a folk and Jewish provincial world could enter the centre of modern art on equal terms. The discount: that reach belongs to the early Chagall as a whole, of which this canvas is the emblem rather than the sole cause; the main lines of painting after 1911, abstraction, Dada, the constructive, went elsewhere; and some of the reach is to sweetened imagery. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the dream picture of Surrealism, the folk modernism of Eastern European and Jewish art, and a broad later line of illustration and magic realist imagery stand in its debt.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at 115 years. Form: whole. The image is the image painted, and nothing that carries its meaning is lost. Presence: on public view at The Museum of Modern Art since 1945, among the museum’s most visited pictures, continuously reproduced and taught as the emblem of the painter and of his Paris years. It has outlived its moment, the Paris of 1911 and the Vitebsk it recalls, destroyed in the war, and it has outlived the painter’s own later decades of softer repetition, which might have worn it down and have not. Fabric: the ordinary history of a canvas of its age, with nothing charged. Fame is presence and earns at most a tenth; the figure stops short of the widest, because its presence, though large, is narrower than that of the very few universal images.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas. The colour is the command: a saturated red set against the green face and the white head, complementaries held at full pitch across nearly three square metres without muddying, the planes cut cleanly and keyed so that the two heads stay dominant over a crowded field. The transparencies, the milkmaid inside the head and the planes that pass through objects, are managed with real control. The drawing is deliberately naive, and in the heads it is strong: the eye, the lip, the cap are set down with economy and authority. The costs: the small figures of the upper band are drawn summarily, some planes are decorative fill rather than structure, and the Cubist geometry is applied with less rigour than in its sources. Load-bearing in colour, less so in construction.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the geometric circle at the lower left, a piece of Orphist abstraction, and the inverted peasant woman in the upper band, a folk anecdote. They obey one law, and the law is memory: everything is scaled, placed and turned by its weight in the remembering mind, and the geometry is the mind’s own grid laid over what it recalls. The circle can be a sun and the axis of a wheel because nothing here is measured from outside. The range is wide for one canvas, from the cosmos to a pail of milk, from a church to the inside of a cow’s head. What resists: the imported faceting at times reads as a second idiom laid over the first, a style rather than a physics, and the small figures of the upper band, at their own scale and finish, sit somewhat apart from the two great heads.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders held: the self, in the I and its green face; the animal and the bond with it; labour, in the milking and the scythe; the village as a settlement; the sacred, in the church; the cosmos, in the sun or moon below; nature, in the lit tree; and memory, which holds them all. They are integrated by the wheel of the composition and the line between the eyes, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what is absent or slight: the state; history, for the Pale, the pogroms and the coming war are nowhere in it; the family except by implication; and any conflict. The picture holds a whole remembered world, small and sweet, more than a single painting usually holds, but it holds it without its cost. The figure describes the form.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Swerve and The Made at 8.5, then The Living Form at 8.4. A canvas whole after 115 years, on public view since 1945 and the emblem of its painter; the newest syntax of Paris, the Cubist plane and the Orphist disc, turned to carry the memory, story and folk world it was built to exclude; colour held at full pitch across nearly three square metres, the green face against the red; and a form that knows what it knows, that memory has no single viewpoint, scale or direction, by refusing all three.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the self, the animal, labour, the village, the sacred, the cosmos, nature and memory held on one wheel, with the state, history, the family and any conflict absent. Then The Sublime at 7.8: one gentle register of wonder, without terror or rise. Then The Inevitable at 7.9: a necessary core and an upper band that is a count rather than a structure. Then The Unconcealment at 8.0: one proposition, that memory has its own physics, sweetly put, and a larger part given as mood. The four are one fact: the picture holds a whole remembered world, small and sweet, without its cost.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 fall short of it, the disclosure one proposition with the rest a mood, the myth of the lost home summoned more than built and benign, the reach the early Chagall’s as a whole, of which this canvas is the emblem. The Universal Minimum is met (its lowest axis is The Sublime at 7.8, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.5, an average of 8.21 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV, two tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the canvas as it hangs and in good reproduction; the composition known well, its documentary history moderately. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the single canvas: Marc Chagall, I and the Village, in French Moi et le village, oil on canvas, 192.1 by 151.4 cm, painted in Paris in 1911, dated and signed, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired in 1945 through the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. Nothing of its form is known to be lost or replaced; its condition is not stated and is weighed on The Imperishable alone. The area and proportion are computed from the dimensions. Chagall’s other Vitebsk pictures of 1911 to 1913, To Russia, Asses and Others, The Fiddler and Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, and the Cubist and Orphist painting of Paris, are context and are not scored. No words of the painter are quoted; only the titles are given. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them who gave the canvas its title, a face in the church doorway, the picture’s exhibition history before it entered the museum, its condition reports, whether it was painted at La Ruche or before the painter moved there, and the particular words of the poets and critics of his circle on his work.