Profil de femme et main au coq

In the present gouache, Chagall references the art historical tradition of painting portraits in profile in a resplendent nighttime scene that is paradoxically replete with autobiographical motifs. Chagall’s contribution, Profil de femme et main au coq, is both whimsical and zany, and allowed the artist to relish in the vivid colors of the thickly applied paints and ink above all. Here emerged a contrast between the monumental and the miniature, and between stillness and action. The subject’s profile and figure preside over and dominate the landscape, while her hand somehow brandishes a bouquet and rooster on opposite sides of the palm. The sky is full of moving shapes, although the townscape on the horizon appears still. Like his Renaissance ancestors, Chagall conjured a world beyond the facial topography of the foreground sitter, delighting in the masterful details of the background, which impregnate the composition with deeper personal meaning and in turn help frame the potential identity of the female figure. But unlike Chagall’s painterly predecessors, he does not distance his figure from the background in an interior setting; Chagall relies instead entirely on a hierarchy of scale. Strange, mysterious figures blend into the buildings: a nude woman who looks directly out to the viewer, and the faint outline of a top-hatted man, neither phantom nor substantial, shrugging his hands. The roosters and donkey were recurring iconography in Chagall’s oeuvre which allude to the artist’s rustic childhood in Vitebsk. In this dreamlike creation, the sitter could be the artist’s eternal love, Bella, with whom Chagall fell in love at first sight when they met in Vitebsk in 1909, or his Vava, who the painter married in 1952; she thereafter served as an important figure in his work.
Executed in 1962, the present work is neither portrait nor fantasy. Chagall stated in a 1944 interview, "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" (quoted in J.J. Sweeney, Marc Chagall, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1946, p. 63). Chagall remained interested, however, in the allegorical potency of images of this type. Although sometimes a self-representation, “the cock has an entirely different and far stranger nature than the quadrupeds, which, despite their four feet, are more closely related to man. For thousands of years it has played a part in religious rites as the embodiment of the forces of sun and fire. This symbolic meaning still lingers on in Chagall's work, where the cock represents elementary spiritual power" (F. Meyer, Marc Chagall, New York, 1964, pp. 380-381). Music also holds an important place in Chagall’s oeuvre, to which the handsomely-dressed accordionist testifies. Chagall believed musical tone to be commensurate with paint: "The depth of color goes through the eyes and remains within the soul, in the same way that music enters the ear and stays in the soul"' (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, ed., Chagall: A Retrospective, New York, 1995, p. 181).