Observe the painter’s works, and you are soon aware of what is so very singular about the world he depicts. Strange characters from another age inhabit improbable spaces; animals are transfigured; a huddle of architecture forms the backdrop to scenes that are both ordinary yet magical. Again and again we are invited to contemplate a world where upheaval could equal catastrophe - or tragic muddle - or indeed enchantment and delight. That is why we are so readily drawn into Chagall’s canvases, each one of which reveals episodes in which human beings, animals and objects are displaced, promenaded, transferred. Topsy turvy, the images detach themselves from contingent reality, from their point of origin.
For summer 2010, the musée national Marc Chagall will show a number of previously unseen works - paintings and drawings - depicting complex landscapes in which figures, animals and objects defy the laws of gravity, twirling in every direction and turning conventional representation on its head. The exhibition sets out to shed fresh light on the factors which led the artist to conceive a world in which, as he put it, "a man needs to be face to face with what is behind him to affirm he is walking forwards" or "an upright vase does not exist, it must fall to prove it is stable". We look in turn at the artist’s
relationship with the Surrealists, who were adept at "revolution" and turning established values on their head. But the exhibition also makes room to address other theories, particularly those concerning the artist’s religious identity. The roaming forms, their migration towards the very centre of the painting, their constant peregrinations seem, in fact, to hint at a link with the exoduses the Jewish people underwent at various times in their history. In quite different ways, The Striking of the Rock (1960-66) and Song of Songs IV (1958) offer powerful versions of this tendency, in which people, animals and objects break away from their moorings and move freely through space. The world that Chagall portrays is, in a very real sense, a world turned upside down. It is a world in which "time has no shores", to borrow the title of a 1930's painting in which the betrothed and the married, rabbis and musicians, clocks and carts, donkeys and cockerels - even the artist himself, so often self-portrayed - give themselves up to bold acrobatics, not unlike the circus performers the artist liked so much to take as his subjects. The exhibition brings together ninety one works, 23 paintings and 68 drawings, of which some twenty have not previously been shown.
