Dans mon pays

The work from the GAM collections was painted while Chagall and his family were in exile in the United States, where he arrived in 1941 to escape Nazi-Fascist persecution, in acceptance of an invitation by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In America, the painter from Vitebsk found numerous fellow artists who had fled the war, including Léger, Masson, Mondrian and André Breton, and he immediately began to exhibit works in American galleries and museums, and to design sets for ballets with music by Čajkovskij and Stravinskij. The work in Turin, from 1943, is one of the pictures that Marc Chagall painted in the picturesque landscape of Cranberry Lake, New York state. In the painting, the artist recalls the image of a snow-covered Russian village, swathed in a delicate nocturnal atmosphere, with tones of dark and light blue that highlight the suspension of space and time. The effect of the moonlight, which shines in the centre of the composition, covers every element in the painting and gives it a dream-like atmosphere. We see a flying cow, the blue outline of a mysterious horse and the oddity of a chicken with a man’s head, and the artist has depicted himself suspended above the earth in a delicate embrace with his beloved first wife, Bella. The work has similarities to another painted in 1944, entitled “The House with the Green Eye”. However, rather than being a delicate re-evocation of a domestic scene, like the painting from GAM, it is dominated by the disturbing and surreal image of a large eye.