MARC CHAGALL (1887-1985)

Executed in a vivid play of vibrant blues and reds, Vision du peintre au double visage offers a dream-like vision that challenges and captivates in equal measure. As indicated by the title, the primary focus of the composition is the painter in the lower-half of the scene, who appears to almost float through the townscape as he reclines on the back of a donkey. Depicted with a palette in hand and a Janus-like double face, which allows him to look in two directions at once, he captures the feverish energy with which the artist views the world, absorbing his surroundings and gathering impressions to fuel his work. This dual-faced character had a long lineage in the artist’s oeuvre, and was frequently deployed as a mediator between two worlds – interior versus exterior space, past and present, the imaginary and the real.

Chagall enjoyed disrupting expectations by playing with the heads and faces of his characters, frequently inverting a visage, or dislocating them entirely from the body. The double-faced figure is an extension of this theme, posing a surreal solution as their gaze is drawn in two competing directions. This is the case in Chagall’s renowned composition Paris par la fenêtre (1913; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), which uses the double face to explore the artist’s psychological turmoil during this period of his life. Simultaneously looking West and East, it suggests the pull the artist felt between two locations – torn between the vibrancy and excitement of Paris and his life in Vitebsk, where his beloved Bella remained without him. In other instances, Chagall used the dual-visage as an opportunity to create a double portrait, combining two figures in a single body in a manner that suggests a close intimacy and personal connection that went to the very core of their being.