La Maison (The House)

Marc Chagall

While in Berlin in 1922, Chagall was introduced to the techniques of printmaking by Hermann Struck and he completed his first etchings in three weeks. He also produced six woodcuts during this time, all of which related to life in Russia. They would be the last the artist produced as an Eastern Russian artist; by 1922, the policies of Vladimir Lenin had a firm grip on its citizens and this woodcut reflects Chagall's disillusionment with the Bolshevik government - once promising for many artists after the fall of the Tzarist Empire, but soon proving to be restrictive in its own way.

Here, a uniformed man armed with a gun has his leg raised in a lockstep. His head is hidden by the overhang of the roof, concealing him while he seemingly eavesdrops on conversations within the house. A boot and cap on the roof appear as symbols of the lost Russia of Chagall’s childhood.

A further tribute to Russia are the Cyrillic letters carved into the sky at the peak of the roof, an abbreviation of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (Russian SFSR or RSFSR), what became in 1922 the most important socialist republic within the Soviet Union. Prior to the founding of the Soviet Union, the SFSR was an independent socialist state, founded in 1918 at the end of the First Word War.