The Fantastic Beast

Two copies of The Fantastic Beast were cast in bronze from a sculpture made of plaster on metal framework. This is Chagall’s most frequently exhibited sculpture. The bronze castings were made using the lost wax technique. The wax model of the sculpture, made from the plaster version, was surrounded in a mold made of refractory earth or cement. This both enveloped the outside and filled the inside. Molten metal then chased out the wax, which liquefied under the heat and ran out the sprus and gates placed on the wax model prior to casting, for the purpose of letting wax and air out. Lastly, the bronze copy was devested—freed from its mold—and then cleaned of remaining shell material, polished, and perhaps covered in a patina.
Taking the appearance of an ass, a horse, or even a cat, the quadruped walks at a relaxed pace, frozen in its momentum. On its right flank, next to a tail made of delicate vegetation, it carries a couple in an embrace, forming one with the animal forevermore. The fantastical creature takes shape, deriving its style from Chagall’s pictorial world. In his Parisian years and throughout the decades to come, Chagall’s works were studded with a multitude of hybridizations. These include, among others, the man with a bull’s head (To My Fiancée [Dédié à ma fiancée] (1911)), the cat with a human face (Paris Through the Window [Paris par la fenêtre ou Paris à travers la fenêtre] (1913)), the Eiffel Tower man (Bonjour Paris [Bonjour Paris] (1939 - 1942)), the two-headed painter with one human head and one ass head, with a winged clock flying overhead (Self-portrait With Clock [Autoportrait à la pendule] (1947)), and the rooster-woman over Paris (Bird-Woman or Rooster-Woman [La femme-oiseau ou La femme-coq] (1956 - 1967)). The painter, moved by the desire to create a new reality, devises a spectacle of anatomical chaos, of impossible marvels.
In this surprising world, the sculpted Fantastical Beast—a digression from identity, a complex hybridization between human, animal, and the botanical—seems, on the contrary, well balanced and quite serious. The beast’s vigilance contrasts with the peaceful, carefree couple nestled along its side. The image of lovers floating in the clouds reappears again and again throughout Chagall’s body of work. A similar composition is found in La Bastille, 1953, where the couple is paired with a large red cow. In The Fantastic Beast, the migratory and protective animal is a figure of travel—an allegory of peregrination and composite identity—thereby echoing the artist’s life as it was punctuated by two world wars, and marked by immigration and exile. A timeless piece, this sculpture can also be perceived as a representation of the benevolence and wisdom of the living, transcended by a feeling of humility and fascination before the laws of nature in the Russian mind, from the Middle Ages to landscape art in the19^th and early 20^th centuries. “It is when the artist is in a minority before nature that he has the most luck with it, if he submits.” (Marc Chagall.)