Le cirque dans le ciel bleu de Paris 1978 - 1981

Curator: Oh, the blueness! It just wraps around you, doesn’t it? Like a childhood dream painted on a summer sky. Editor: You're right, it’s arresting! We're looking at Marc Chagall's "Le cirque dans le ciel bleu de Paris," painted between 1978 and 1981. It feels...unmoored, adrift, yet strangely joyful, almost bursting at the seams with Fauvist color. Tell me about the materials, the layers? Curator: Well, that blue is layered oil paint. See how thin it is in places? How the light shines right through? He thins it way down, letting the white of the canvas breathe, letting the circus take flight. Chagall isn't just painting a circus; he's painting the feeling *of* a circus. A rooster tumbles downward, clowns mingle with the Eiffel tower… It’s all connected, intertwined. Editor: Intertwined… or a pile-up? From my angle, I notice the material instability; this could collapse at any minute. Note the rough, almost hurried application of the oil paint. It speaks of a frenetic process, a desire to capture movement and maybe the energy of the spectacle more than precision. There’s no clear foreground, no real background… only raw emotional immediacy rendered with relatively inexpensive oil-based paints on mass-produced canvas. Curator: Perhaps immediacy is what gives it its charm? Its power? Chagall understood something essential about the poignancy of clowns and circuses -the ephemeral nature of joy, the precariousness of existence itself. Look at that small figure on horseback - the sun burning directly above. He understands what it is like to fly towards something. Editor: Precisely - even as it collapses. The paint reflects this—it's fleeting! It seems as if Chagall intended a kind of controlled deterioration here. A focus on production not in service of illusion, but in service of revealing an unsettling precariousness about all things… Even Parisian circuses rendered with accessible art materials! Curator: It all dissolves…back to blue…thank goodness we found a thread of truth in it, after all, maybe even a little freedom. Editor: Indeed. Thank you, Marc!