Marc Chagall · Paris par la Fenêtre

1913 – Óleo sobre lienzo – Guggenheim Museum, New York

Raised in a poor Jewish family in Russia, Marc Chagall moved to Paris in 1923, where he felt like a stranger, a foreigner “amazed by light”, in his own words.

Despite having exhibited at the “Salon des Independents” with the main artists of his era, Chagall always stayed faithful to his peculiar style, a style -according to his own words- “poetic without poetry, mystic without mysticism”. Perhaps due to this obstinacy his last works are quite irregular, but during his first years in Paris he painted masterpieces full of mystery and imagination, just as the work illustrated here. With its shining colours, strange figures and unusual composition, this painting by Marc Chagall talks about a mysterious and indecipherable Paris in which nothing -or nobody- is really what they appear to be.

Text by G. Fernández, theartwolf.com