ANNY AVIRAM: I chose to work on this painting
because I thought it would be not only revealing
the bright colors of the painting that were already
very obscured by years of neglect,
but also this painting always resonated with me because
of memories of my own family.
My name is Anny Aviram.
I'm a Senior Paintings Conservator here at MoMA.
This work is called I and the Village.
And it's painted by Marc Chagall in Paris in 1911.
This painting depicts his memories
of his Hasidic community in Vitebsk, now Belarus.
So in the village where he lived, he lived among animals,
and people lived together.
For Hasidics, animals meant another side of humanity.
To emphasize the relationship with the animals
and the peasants, he draws a line
here between the eye of the cow and the peasant,
sort of connecting that line.
You know what's interesting?
He started it here, and then he goes
like this- I just noticed that.
And then here, he goes here, and goes [swish].
They're the same size, which is incredible to think
that he makes them equal.
Then he, of course, starts thinking
about the tree of life.
So here is a representation of this hand
holding a tree of life.
And, of course, then all the circles that he does,
these pink circles.
They could represent the orbiting of the moon,
the Earth, and the sun.
Then you see the life of the peasants here.
This is a woman milking a goat.
And then a typical peasant with his tools to go to the country.
And he always does these sort of upside-down people.
Here he gives you a little sense of Russia
with the cupolas of the church in the upper right,
and then the houses where people live together.
When I saw the little village is when
I felt a strong connection to the painting
on a personal level.
Because I could just imagine how my grandparents
lived in a small little village in Poland.
And at the turn of the 1900s, they had to flee.
And then my parents had the same situation.
In 1940, they had to flee again.
Ultimately, they came to Mexico where my other siblings and I
were born.
When you work on a painting, you want
to learn a lot about the painting.
But also, you want to learn what was happening
to him in general in his life.
He also flees Europe during World War II.
When I learned that he ended up in Mexico, setting up the Aleko
Ballet- and he was welcomed so warmly-
I also was thinking of how my parents arrived in Mexico
and also were-- arrived there and taken with open arms.
Because Mexico, at the time, was taking a lot of refugees.
And not many countries in the world were doing that.
So there's a huge culture of intellects and artists
that came to Mexico, and they stayed there.
They made it their home.
That's in a nutshell what I can tell you
about some of the symbolism in this painting.