| I and the Village | |
| Artist: | Marc Chagall |
| Image Upright: | 1 |
| Catalogue: | 78984 |
| Accession: | 146.1945 |
| Medium: | Oil on canvas |
| Height Metric: | 192.1 |
| Width Metric: | 151.4 |
| Metric Unit: | cm |
| Imperial Unit: | in |
| Museum: | Museum of Modern Art |
| City: | New York |
I and the Village is a 1911 oil-on-canvas painting by the Belarusian-French artist Marc Chagall created in 1911. It is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.[1]
The work is Cubist in construction and contains many soft, dreamlike images overlapping one another in a continuous space.[2] In the foreground, a cap-wearing green-faced man stares at a goat or sheep with the image of a smaller goat being milked on its cheek. In the foreground is a glowing tree held in the man's dark hand. The background features a collection of houses next to an Orthodox church, and an upside-down female violinist in front of a black-clothed man holding a scythe. The green-faced man wears a necklace with St. Andrew's cross. As the title suggests, I and the Village is influenced by memories of the artist's place of birth and his relationship to it.[1] [3] [4]
The significance of the painting lies in its seamless integration of various elements of Eastern European folktales and culture, both Belarusian and Yiddish.[5] Its clearly defined semiotic elements (e.g. The Tree of Life) and daringly whimsical style were at the time considered groundbreaking.[6] Its frenetic, fanciful style[3] is credited to Chagall's childhood memories becoming, in the words of scholar H. W. Janson, a "cubist fairy tale"[7] reshaped by his imagination, without regard to natural color, size or even the laws of gravity.[3]