Marc Chagall on Art and Painting

Marc Chagall: Anecdote and Fantasy

" There is nothing anecdotal in my pictures - no fairy tales - no literature in the sense of folk-legend associations. "

" For me a picture is a plane surface covered with representations of objects - beasts, birds, or humans - in a certain order in which anecdotal illustrational logic has no importance. The visual effectiveness of the painted composition comes first. Every extra-structural consideration is secondary. "

" I am against the terms ' fantasy' and ' symbolism ' in themselves. All our interior world is reality - and that perhaps more so than our apparent world. To call everything that appears illogical, ' fantasy', fairy tale or chimera would be practically to admit not understanding nature. "

Marc Chagall: Plastic Values and Poetic Values

" In painting, the images of a woman or of a cow have different values of plasticity - but not different poetic values. "

" What I mean by ' abstract ' is something which comes to life spontaneously through a gamut of contrasts, plastic at the same time as psychic, and pervades both the picture and the eye of the spectator with conceptions of new and unfamiliar elements ..."

Source
Goldwater, R & Treves, M. 1976. Artists on Art, From the 14th to the 20th Century . John Murray.

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