Chagall Vue de Paris – Puzzle 1000 pieces

The Chagall composition Vue de Paris blends elements of childhood fantasy, nostalgia, and several distinctive motifs, including the woman floating in the sky, which typically appears in many of Chagall’s art forms.
Despite the difficulties of his life, this optimistic artist intended his work to be an ode to the vibrant colors of life and love.

Chagall’s deep love for Paris inspired many other paintings, including the “Paris Series,” which was created between 1953 and 1956. Although Chagall’s View of Paris was painted years after the “Paris Series,” it contains many of the same themes and confirms that the artist’s enduring passion for the city had not changed over the years, even as the city had changed.

Chagall was born in Lyozno, near Vitebsk, Belarus, to a poor Jewish family on July 7, 1887. He studied in his hometown and at the Imperial School of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg . From 1910 to 1914 he lived in Paris, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants in 1912.
Having returned to Russia, he was active during the October Revolution but, in conflict with the influential Kazimir Malevich, he was forced to abandon the direction of the Vitebsk Academy, which he himself founded.

In 1923 he returned to Paris and from there traveled to Palestine, Italy, England, Holland, and Spain. In 1941 he moved to the United States and returned to France only in 1948. He died in Saint-Paul-de-Vence on March 28, 1985.

Chagall and Paris

During his first stay in Paris, Chagall was struck by the color of the Fauves and the research of Delaunay, perhaps the least Cubist of the Cubists. His encounter with Abstraction and Surrealism was a rejection for the former and only a tangential one for the latter.
His poetic world is nourished by a fantasy that harks back to childish naivety and fairy tales , always deeply rooted in Russian tradition .

Indeed, his little figures, carried by the wind, occupy a space where orientation no longer exists. Above and below are equivalent: as in dreams, everything is possible and true.
In Paris from a Window (1913) , the Eiffel Tower hovers over the rooftops of Paris as if poised for flight. A small train, breaking all laws of gravity, travels upside down, while the blue hand of a two-faced man perhaps caresses the humanized cat sitting on the windowsill. Although painted in Paris, this work does not depict what Chagall could see from his studio: exterior views and imaginary interiors are inseparably combined in this canvas. The Eiffel Tower, a beloved subject also of Robert Delaunay and Blaise Cendrars, friends of the artist, stands tall as a metaphor for Paris.
The parachutist, the human-headed cat, the two-faced bust, the upside-down train, the couple walking obliquely, all belong to Chagall’s fantastic Paris .