La vache dans la chambre

Vache dans la chambre is a rare, early and powerful tour de force of a young Marc Chagall. Executed in 1911, this vivid gouache exemplifies the dynamic eclecticism of the Russian artist at the start of his career, just when he first arrived in Paris from his native Vitebsk in 1910. The present work, a study for the oil La chambre jaune (Fondation Beyeler, Basel), takes on a shining green and silver interior as stage for a dream-like, night-time scene. A man, walking to an open door, looks back towards a table, where a woman is left with raised arms. On the other side of the room, a cow lies on the floor. The doorway opens onto a sleepy townscape of low-rise homes, smoking chimneys, and a crowning, shimmering moon.

The present lot belongs to a series of seminal works in which Chagall explored his identity, both Russian and Jewish, within the context of Paris, where he would remain until 1914. Indeed, the artist’s immersion in the art of the city was immediate: Chagall visited the Salon des Indépendents the day after his arrival.

In Paris he discovered the great masters at the Louvre; Van Gogh, Matisse and Gaugin at Galérie Bernheim; Cezanne, Renoir and Monet at Durand-Ruel. Soon after, he would encounter Picasso, Braque and Léger, ushering in a significant period of growth and exchange in his nascent career: ‘it was exactly at this moment that Chagall became Chagall’ (A. Kamensky, Chagall. The Russian Years, 1907-1922, London, 1989, p. 73).

As in the village series, the present work depicts a quotidian scene in a setting that recalls Vitebsk; yet, crucially, the folkloric elements of this seminal provincial culture are here rendered through novel vocabularies — cubist forms and fauvist palettes. In this way, the visual techniques Chagall deploys are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s Le café de nuit: including an intensified chromatic selection, where one or two colours dominate the composition; an unnaturally high viewpoint, distorting the perspective of the room and its elements; and the atmosphere of artificial light indicating the late hours of the night.

Vache dans la chambre offers a rare and unique insight into Chagall’s artistic development. In the present gouache, ornamental patterns adorn the floor, table, and chair; a samovar and a set of cups are rendered in detail. Their presence denotes the artist’s interest in incorporating vernacular decorative motifs. Their absence in the later oil version, on the other hand, reveals Chagall’s absorption of the ‘pure’ Avant-Garde pictorial language, where simplified compositions take precedence. Thus, Vache dans la chambre reveals and announces some of Chagall’s most perennial symbols: the couple, the cow, the still life – barely standing on the table – and a bold defiance of gravity, tropes he would continue to explore throughout his fabled career.