Joy of Collage with Marc Chagall
Finding comfort in the dreamy, experimental, vibrant works of an influential and inspiring artist
The playfulness of collage seems to be a natural fit for Marc Chagall (1887–1985). He was an artist unafraid to work in many different forms including stained glass, book illustrations, tapestry, stage sets, and costume designs. So, I was excited to have the chance to see a selection of his joyful collages, ranging from the 1950s to the early 1970s, in a recent exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Chagall At Work: Drawings, Ceramics and Sculptures 1945–1970. Let’s take a closer look at some of these experimental collages — not only to learn more about Marc Chagall, but also to explore the place of art as an expression of joy in our troubling world today.
In his collage of 1966, Sketch for The Horse Rider, the colourful surface is thick with layered gouache paint, tissue paper, and different fabrics. This is a playful image in both materials and subject-matter. We see a man, wearing a bowler hat and holding a bunch of flowers, astride a rearing horse, which turns to look back at its rider with a smile. In the red-hued background, we can make out a variety of images, including a woman in a bonnet — also holding flowers, a nude woman with a gentle smile, small houses, a yellow moon and an ink sketch of what appears to be a mother and child. The rider and horse have the extravagance and magic of circus performers, surrounded by a dream-like world of colour and phantoms — perhaps a blend of memory and imagination.
The circus was a recurring theme in Chagall’s work, spanning back to the village fairs of his childhood in Vitebsk — a city in modern-day Belarus which was then part of the Russian Empire. In the 1920s, Chagall’s dealer and print publisher Ambroise Vollard asked the artist to create artworks based on the circus, a theme which he would continue to explore for the rest of his life. In 1966, Chagall wrote: “For me, a circus is a magic show that appears and disappears like a world. These clowns, bareback riders and acrobats have made themselves at home in my visions. Why? Why am I so touched by their make-up and their grimaces? With them I can move towards new horizons.” [source]
In another collage of the circus, Chagall depicts the crowd as loose circles of ink that allude to the rows of heads peering down on the entertainers below. The white page is a jumble of fast lines of ink, grey and coloured pencils, bright oil pastels, layered over patches of roughly-cut fabrics and coloured paper forms. The most eye-catching circus entertainers are the ones made up almost entirely of these colourful fragments, which Chagall has then sketched over.
It is unclear whether these figures grew out of the patches, with Chagall taking cues from their rather random assortment of shapes. Notice how the orange-and-blue piece of fabric in the flute-playing horse does not fit neatly into its body shape — nor do the shapes of fabric in the ambiguous figure floating above it. In other collages, Chagall plays in similar ways with shapes of coloured paper, fragments of photographs and even photographic reproductions of artworks. It is in these playful shapes in particular that we sense Chagall harnessing the imaginative flexibility of collage, delving into his own fantastical visions to find visual expressions for them. As German Surrealist painter Max Ernst said, “Collage is the noble conquest of the irrational, the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them.” [source]
Undoubtedly, Chagall’s willingness to play with different materials in his collages created some of their most exciting moments. In Couple of Red Goat, produced around 1970, Chagall used a cypress leaf to create the floating body of a woman, who swoops down from an intense blue sky towards her male lover. In another collage, the body of a flying bride is covered by her veil, made of a large patch of white lace. The lace and leaves are small fragments of objects which, as viewers, we recognise from our own material realities — only now they have been re-cast into another world, where they become large textured bodies enmeshed in fantastical visions.
As I was looking at Chagall’s collages in the exhibition, I overheard a man say, with a tinge of disappointment in his voice, “It is all happy.” I could see what he meant. All of the images seemed to be filled with smiling figures and bright colours. There was joy in every image. I started to realise how rarely this seems to happen at art exhibitions, and how refreshing it felt. Chagall himself said: “The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.”
Chagall experienced many troubles in his life. In 1933, monographs about his work were among the books burned by the Nazis. The same year, Chagall wrote: “If a painter is a Jew and paints life, how is he to keep Jewish elements out of his work! But if he is a good painter, his painting will contain a great deal more. The Jewish content will be there, of course, but his art will aim at universal relevance.” [source]
After the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Chagall fled with his family to New York, returning later in 1948. During these years in America, Chagall’s beloved wife Bella Rosenfeld— a Jewish Russian writer who he’d married in 1915 — contracted a viral infection and died suddenly. Many months of inactivity followed, and when Chagall eventually started painting again, it centred around Bella’s memory. Biographer Jackie Wullschlager explains: “As news poured in through 1945 of the ongoing Holocaust at Nazi concentration camps, Bella took her place in Chagall’s mind with the millions of Jewish victims.” [source]
In this context, Chagall’s ability to capture the human capacity for joy, love, and imagination becomes even more powerful. Today, we need this more than ever. Writer Rebecca Solnit talks about the importance of joy in resistance movements: “When you face a politics that aspires to make you fearful, alienated and isolated, joy is a fine act of insurrection.”
I cannot help but think of the brightly coloured, joyful artworks of Heba Zagout, a Palestinian painter who was killed along with two of her children by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on 13 October 2023. They seem to echo Chagall’s own words that, “Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.”
In today’s scary world of war, environmental breakdown, extreme inequality and instability, art becomes a tool through which we can connect to joy, love and hope — and turn these feelings into actions.
* All images are used with license or presented here for educational purposes under fair usage policy. Author provided images are used here by kind permission. All rights reserved. Please do not re-use without appropriate written consent.
