About the Work
“Art seems to me a state of mind more than anything,” Chagall said to his friend Guillaume Apollinaire. Inner worlds are also the theme of the painting ‘One says’, executed in Paris in 1912, in which a rabbi interrupts his perusal of a book to treat himself to a pinch of snuff. Concentrating on yellow, green and black, the work’s palette contributes as much to the painting’s enigmatic atmosphere as it does to the artist’s upside-down signature. In the 1920s, Chagall carried out a second version of this early major work (now in the Kunstmuseum Basel).