Marc Chagall

Rain

1911

Marc Chagall’s early work is characterized by a neo-primitive style derived primarily from Russian icons and folk art. When he moved from Russia to Paris in the summer of 1910, the artist took with him several of these paintings depicting the life and customs of his native Vitebsk. During the next year he reworked them and also painted new compositions with similar motifs, infused with nostalgia for his homeland, but now adapted according to techniques and concepts he acquired from exposure to current French art. Nondescriptive, saturated color is used in Rain in combination with assertive areas of white and black to produce a highly ornamental and vivid surface. The breaking up of some areas of the composition into shaded planes, for example the roof of the house and the left foreground, has its source in Cubism, though this device is handled somewhat randomly.

Not on View

Artist Marc Chagall
Original Title La Pluie
Date 1911
Medium Oil (and charcoal?) on canvas
Dimensions 86.7 x 108 cm
Credit line Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York)
Accession 76.2553 PG 63
Collection Peggy Guggenheim Collection
Type Painting

Copy caption

Not on View


Other artworks