Face and Animals

A testament to Chagall’s perpetually moving creativity, the collection of painted stones known to date includes seven pieces. One of them features a base (Mockup for The Mermaid or The Song [Maquette pour La Sirène ou Le Cantique] (circa 1967)), while another is part of a composition (Mockup for Madonna With Donkey [Maquette pour La Madone à l'âne] (circa 1968 - 1971)). However, as the painter’s son David McNeil recalls, there was a more prolific production of stones painted during their long walks along the beach, in Cagnes-sur-Mer, near Vence: “My father would take boxes of oil pastels out of his pockets [...]. [...] the stones would quickly be adorned with fish and birds, mullet fish, mermaids, young women, little girls with delicate torsos, portraits of my uncle, for whom I was named¹...” These ephemeral creations would then immediately be thrown to skip along the surface of the sea, before finding their place, according to the artist’s son’s account, in the “jellyfish museum.”
Like a vast number of modern and contemporary artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, and Giuseppe Penone, Chagall took ownership of objects created and shaped by nature. Working with the shape and texture of the mineral medium, upon which his effigies were carefully adapted, Chagall carried on in the tradition of Prehistoric art. The fascination with forms created by non-organic materials, their comparison with “living” forms in nature, and their combination with the shapes of artistic objects do indeed fall within an ancestral tradition. As proof, the Far Eastern masters were subdued by nature’s most “intentional” shapes, “which seemed to have been designed by an obscure art” (Henri Focillon). An additional phenomenon were the curiosity cabinets of the West, where a certain scientific line of thinking crystallized in collections blending objets d’art and creations of nature.