CHAGALL | ZADKINE | CRISS - CROSSED TRAJECTORIES

13 NOVEMBRE 2020 - 25 AVRIL 2021

Chagall and Zadkine were born and grew up in the same world, the one - disappeared forever - of a provincial town known as Vitebsk, located at the outposts of the Russian Empire, in what was called at that time, The Pale of Settlement. From this town of Vitebsk, of which the atmosphere has been immortalized by Chagall, located in the heart of one of the most unknown and fascinating areas on theborders of the Tsarist Russia, to Paris where they decided to settle before the First World War, through New-York in the 1940s, where both had to live in exile, the life of these two artists - determined by thedark vicissitudes of the twentieth century history - had never ceased following an astonishingly similar course. Their trajectories were criss-crossed.

This proximity of two major personalities of the 20th history of art, singular as well as eminent, had never been studied before. Chagall’s works, however, constitute, in many ways, a major key to understand the singularity of Zadkine’s, on which they shed light in a powerful way. They reveal the components which, mingled with avant-garde accents, secretly infuse them, referring to the world they both were coming from and which fantasy they carried within themselves.Through the influence of the avant-gardes to which they were close and from which they borrowed, without ever ceasing to free themselves from them, Chagall and Zadkine have in common, oscillating between adhering to the researches of their time and resisting any idea of system, to have remained throughout their lives in a similar independence and in the affirmation of their individuality and freethinking natures.
The selection of paintings and sculptures displayed for the exhibition will be the opportunity to highlight this common sensibility and to better define its outlines as much as its grounds.