I and the Village

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I and the Village

Marc Chagall, 1911

Oil on canvas

192.1 × 151.4 cm, 63 ⅝ × 59 ⅝ in

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

I and the Village is an early surrealist painting by the Jewish Belarusian-born French artist Marc Chagall. It is currently exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art.

Painted on oil in 1911, the artwork features many soft, dreamlike images overlapping each other: in the foreground, what appears to be a cap-wearing green-faced man stares at a goat or a sheep with a smaller goat being milked in its cheek. In the background, there is a glowing tree being held by a dark hand, a bunch of houses next to an Orthodox church, and an upside down female violinist in front of a black-clothed man holding a scythe. I and the Village seems to examine the relationship between the artist and his place of birth.

The significance of the painting lies in its seamless integration of various elements of Eastern European folktales and culture, both Russian and Yiddish; its clearly defined semiotic elements (e.g. The Tree of Life); and simply its daringly whimsical style, which for the time was considered groundbreaking. Its frenetic, whimsical style is credited to Chagall's childhood memories becoming, in the words of critic H.W. Janson, shaped and reshaped by his imagination but not diminishing with the passing of time.