This painting is a major work of Chagall’s “late” period, and surprises through the modernity of its composition and by the powerful use of black. An artist with a donkey’s head, on the left, is painting a painting in which the crucified person is none other than himself. This donkey-painter presents this strange crucifixion to us with a Russian village in the background, a painting in the painting (placed on an easel), which creates a curious space, the Russian village being repeated in the light backgrounds. Devant le tableau is a double self-portrait that plays with iconographic codes of the self-portrait and image of the painter at work. The frontal composition puts the spectator facing the painting, a black screen that comes away from a background shrouded in greyness, where the outlines of the Vitebsk isbas appear as shades. The black rectangle, which accentuates the dramatic intensity of the Crucifixion, takes part in constructing a timeless space, with a treatment that recalls the works of American artists, such as Barnett Newman, that Chagall discovered in New York in the 1940s.