Witebsk 1887-1985 Saint-Paul
Der Musiker, circa 1922
The Musician
Gouache and watercolor over etched and penciled outlines
272 x 213 mm.; 10 5/8 x 8 3/8 inches
Signed lower left
Provenance:
E. W. Kornfeld
Notes:
1. In this exceptional study, the poetic figure of the musician with his colorful costume, the village, the cow and the couple on the lower left, the cock on the right, the green grass below and the deep blue sky were executed by Chagall in a combination of watercolor and gouache. This work is on a paper with underlying etched and penciled outlines related to Chagall’s Der Musiker (The Musician) (ref. Kornfeld 23). Der Musiker is part of Chagall’s Mein Leben (My Life) series of etchings which recall the artist’s earlier years in Russia. Mein Leben was published by the editor Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1922. The present work also is datable to Berlin circa 1922.
2. Pressured to leave Russia and joined by his wife Bella and their child, Chagall settled in Berlin from the summer of 1922 to the autumn of 1923. In an interview with the French critic Edouard Roditi in 1958 (quoted in: Marc Chagall, Franz Meyer, New York, 1963: p. 316), Chagall described Berlin of this period:
After the war Berlin was a kind of caravansary where all those who shuttled between Moscow and the West met. I found the same sort of atmosphere in Montparnasse until 1930, and again in New York between 1943 and 1945. But in Berlin one felt like living in a dream, sometimes a nightmare. Everybody wanted to buy or sell pictures, and a roll of bread cost millions. In the Bavarian quarter there were almost as many samovars and countesses who practiced theosophy or adored Tolstoi as there used to be in Moscow. In the cellar restaurants on the Motzstrasse one saw more generals and colonels than in a garrison town in tsarist Russia - except that in Berlin they worked as cooks or dishwashers. And never in my life have I seen so many miracle-working rabbis as in Berlin in 1922...