Mauve Nude

About this work

"Nu mauve" of 1967 is catalogued among Chagall’s circus works — a subject that stayed with him for sixty years. And the decisive detail is not in the image but in the material: it is not oil on canvas but oil and sand on canvas. Chagall mixed real sand into the paint to give the surface body and grain.

This is the second case in the exhibition of a painter trying to turn paint into matter, like Utrillo mixing plaster and sand into his white. Both wanted a surface you feel rather than only see. Chagall got there through sand mixed into paint; Rami Alon arrives from the opposite direction — he begins with stone, and the surface is the starting point rather than the goal.