Marc Chagall: Something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover

“Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me”

Marc Chagall, Les Amoureux, 1928

These days I am not merely thinking about Marc Chagall’s artworks – I am living in them, and oh my, what a wonderful place to live in. In particular, I am enjoying gazing at his painting “The Lovers” from 1928. The painting, as suggested in the title, shows two lovers lost in an embrace, floating somehere in the sky, somewhere in the world of their own. The motif of lovers is something that pervades Chagall’s canvases. While the woman is gazing in the distance, the man’s head is leaned on her shoulder, as if seeking comfort. She is looking into the future and he is holding onto her. The crimson colour of the woman’s dress is echoed by the fuchsia coloured background and in the colour of the roses on the right side of the painting. A blue sky with a large full moon and a bird flying by is seen emerging from the bottom right side of the canvas.

Chagall’s lovers don’t live in the real, material, tangible world around us, no, they live in the realm of love, in the soft, feathery, fragrant and sweet clouds of love. Dancing in the sky in the rhythm of each other’s hearts, floating through the night sky like shooting stars. Even when the space around the lovers is real, with its little cottages, wooden fences, cows, goats, fiddlers and mud, this ugly banality is transformed and transcended, it is as if the lovers are completely untouched by it all. It’s like threading over the fresh snow and leaving no footprints. In Chagall’s art the “down to earth” and “dreamy” meet and collide in a perfect way. Chagall is the most tender-hearted man in the world of art and his innocent, imaginative and childlike vision of the world is obvious in his canvases. The figure that always haunts his art is the slender figure of a black haired woman; his beloved wife Bella Rosenfeld.

Marc Chagall, The Promenade, 1917-18

Their early days of love are captured in a series of paintings such as “Birthday”, “Promenade” and “Over the Town”. There is a playful innocence and a pure display of affections in these paintings that chimes with me so well. Chagall takes the phrase “floating in the air” quite literally because in these paintings the lovers are flying indeed; the power of their love is so strong that not even gravity can stop it.”The Promenade” shows Chagall and Bella having a picnic on a meadow outside town but then suddenly Bella is flying in the air like a pink ballon. Chagall is holding her hand but he too will quickly rise into the clouds following his darling. Painting “Over the Town” shows an embracing couple flying above the little houses of the little town which is now too small to contain the vastness of the love that they feel. The houses and the landscape under them both seem faded, as if seen in a dream or in a memory, painted in shades of grey. Only that one house is red, like a crimson red heart pulsating in the rhythm of love.

“Over the Town” is a painting which thematically and aesthetically goes hand in hand with Chagall’s painting “Birthday” painted in 1915; both paintings show lovers magically lifted from the ground by the power of love, the power against which all the mundane things in life suddently seem gray and irrelevant. When I gaze at this paintings, these lovers which all have faces like Chagall and Bella, the lyrics of the Beatles’ song “Something” come to mind;

“Something in the way she moves
Attracts me like no other lover
Something in the way she woos me
I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

Somewhere in her smile she knows
That I don’t need no other lover
Something in her style that shows me
I don’t want to leave her now
You know I believe and how

You’re asking me will my love grow
I don’t know, I don’t know
You stick around, now it may show
I don’t know, I don’t know…“

Marc Chagall, Birthday, 1915

I can imagine Chagall gazing at Bella and musing to himself “something in the way she moves attracts me like no other lover, something in the way she woos me…” In the painting “Birthday” it is Chagall who is flying above Bella though she too is about to join him soon. Again we see the everyday transformed into the wonderful; a simple room, Bella in her everyday clothes, yet there is magic, the magic of love which transforms everything. Bella wrote about this feeling which Chagall so beautifully portrays in his paintings: “I suddenly felt as if we were taking off. You too were poised on one leg, as if the little room could no longer contain you. You soar up to the ceiling. Your head turned down to me, and turned mine up to you… We flew over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, roofs, yards, churches.” In most paintings Bella is portrayed as wearing the same clothes she would have been wearing everyday and on the photos which exists of her, and the town we see is their hometown of Vitebsk in Belorus. Both of these elements bring a domestic kind of familiarity which becomes magical and sweet when Chagall portrays it.

Marc Chagall, Over the Town, 1913

The love at first sight between Bella and Chagall started in 1909 when a beautiful daughter of a rich jeweller met the poor and aspiring painter who worked as an apprentice for Leon Bakst and it lasted for thirty five years until Bella, sadly, passed away three months shy of her forty-nineth birthday in 1944. In his autobiography “My Life”, Chagall writes of Bella: “Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me; as if she has always watched over me, somewhere next to me, though I saw her for the very first time. I knew this is she, my wife. Her pale colouring, her eyes. How big and round and black they are! They are my eyes, my soul.”

Bella, although seemingly a quiet, pale and withdrawn girl, was enthusiastic about Chagall as well, and later wrote about being mesmerised by his ethereal pale blue eyes: “When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes … long, almond-shaped … and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat.“ She also wrote of their first meeting: “I was surprised at his eyes, they were so blue as the sky … I’m lowering my eyes. Nobody is saying anything. We both feel our hearts beating.“

Marc Chagall and Bella in Paris, 1938

Marc Chagall and Bella, c 1920

Chagall’s paintings reflect his way of thinking, he said; “If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.” These are painting created from the heart, indeed. There is no logic, rationality or coldness about his art. Even when he paints in the Cubist manner, his squares and rectangles are not harsh but somehow still coated in the colour of dreams. Chagall had no interest in Cubism and Impressionist and was of an opinion that art is the “state of the soul.”

Marc Chagall, Lovers in Pink, 1916

Marc Chagall, Grey Lovers, 1917

When I am in love I live not in real world but in Chagall’s paintings. I am flying in the night sky and I am bathed in that gorgeous blueness. I am smiling at the stars and they are smiling back at me. Their golden dust is falling all over my white tulle dress. I am floating above the bridges, forests, meadows, flower fields, little houses with red roofs. I hear the violins, and flute, and the guitar, and I am carried away by that sweet music. I smell the violets, the roses, the lily of the valley; what sweet scents fill this warm summer night. Love is a warm summer night. My heart is overflowing with love and bursting into a thousand ruby red rose petals, and the petals fall and fall like a never-ending waterfall. I am melting into shapes, sounds and colours. I am the lilac, I am the crimson, I am the blue. I am the bird and the star. I am a rose petal carried by the wind, travelling far and far beyond. The coldness, dreariness and bleakness of winter Can.Not.Touch.Me. To live always in this way ahh that would be a life well lived. Is it possible? Is it really possible? Gazing at Chagall’s paintings makes me believe that it indeed is.

Marc Chagall and Kokoschka: Flying Lovers

“But I believe in Love
And I know that you do, too
And I believe in some kind of path
That we can walk down, me and you
So keep your candles burning
Make her journey bright and pure
That she’ll keep returning
Always and evermore”

(Nick Cave, Into My Arms)

Marc Chagall, Over the Town, 1913

These two paintings by Marc Chagall and Oskar Kokoschka, painted in 1913 and 1914, both show the same motif; a couple in love, and yet they are so different. Let us see why is that. Chagall’s painting “Over the Town” shows an embracing couple flying in the air, flying above the little houses of the little town which is too small now to contain the love that they feel. The houses and the landscape under them both seem faded, as if seen in a dream or in a memory, painted in shades of grey. Only that one house is red, like a pulsating red heart ready to burst. “Over the Town” is a painting which thematically and aesthetically goes hand in hand with Chagall’s painting “Birthday” painted in 1915; both paintings show lovers magically lifted from the ground by the power of life, the power against which all the mundane things in life suddently seem gray and irrelevant.

Marc Chagall, Birthday, 1915

Chagall’s beloved Bella Rosenfeld, whom he married in July 1915, wrote about this feeling which Chagall so beautifulyl portrays in his paintings: “I suddenly felt as if we were taking off. You too were poised on one leg, as if the little room could no longer contain you. You soar up to the ceiling. Your head turned down to me, and turned mine up to you… We flew over fields of flowers, shuttered houses, roofs, yards, churches.” Bella is painted in the same clothes she would have been wearing everyday and on the photos which exists of her, and the town we see is their hometown of Vitebsk in Belorus. Both of these elements bring a domestic kind of familiarity which becomes magical and sweet when Chagall portrays it. Lines “but I believe in love and I know darling that you do too” from Nick Cave’s song come to my mind as I gaze at this painting and as I think of Chagall and his beloved.

Kokoschka’s lovers are also seen flying in an undefined space, but they are not flying in the clouds of love, rather they are carried by the wind of frenzy and uncertainly and they cling to each other in despair. They are not drawn together by love like Chagall’s lovers but by fear. Lovers found in the whirlwind of political, social and personal changes, nothing to be hold onto because nothing is certain anymore. The painting allegorically represents the painter and his beloved Alma Mahler who was at the time his lover and the wife of the composer Gustav Mahler. They are carried by strong gusts of wind, but it isn’t the wind of passion that carried Paolo and Francesca in Dante’s hell, but the wind of anxiety, uncertainty and the futility of everything. Oskar Kokoschka was a representative of the Viennese Expressionism and this catastrophic vision of the world and the future is typically Expressionistic. The same dreary mood fills his portraits which all have a psychological aspect to them and look as if they were made out of mud and tears, and is similar to painting of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s paintings with urban mood of alienation and premonitions of catastrophe that the World War One was about to bring. Expressionistic art was a whirlwind of colours and screams created from the nervous energy of the antebellum period, and although many artists shared the sentiment, none experienced it so deeply and profoundly as the artists who were the closest to the fire, that is those who lived in the Austria-Hungarian Empire; Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, poets Georg Trakl and August Stramm, Arnold Schönberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern, and many other across the vast decaying empire.

Oskar Kokoschka, The Bride of the Wind (The Tempest), 1914

Let us take a moment to compare how the composition, brushstrokes and colours contribute to the mood that is conveyed; in Chagall’s painting the composition brings a feeling of stability, a steadiness of love shall I say, while in Kokoschka’s painting the composition is more dynamic thus conveying uncertainty. Chagall’s brushstrokes are soft and gentle, his colour palette filled with soft shades and dreamy gues which makes it seem so peaceful and serene, while in Kokoschka’s painting we see how the wild, rough brushstrokes and stronger colours add to the mood opposite of peacefulness. While the vision of love in Chagall’s paintings is pure, idealistic and romantic, in Kokoschka’s painting it is sour as vinegar and cynical. Still, both paintings were painted around the same time which goes to show that the painter naturally expresses what is inside him; Chagall and Kokoschka’s perspectives on things were very different and it shows in their art. I find both paintings immensely interesting, but Chagall’s view of love and his dreaminess is still dearer to me and closer to my heart.

Marc Chagall – A Painter of Childhood

I have a childlike heart. (Sappho, Fragments)

Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911

Marc Chagall is the painter of childhood memories and dreams. It is hard to place his art into a specific art movement, or divide it into distinct phases. His paintings sometimes seem as if they all belong to one great psychedelic puzzle because they are connected with the same motifs that reappear again and again, regardless of the year the painting was made in. Harshness of poverty and ugliness of mud of Chagall’s little village of Vitebsk is magically transformed in his canvases into a mythical land of little cottages with cute small windows, streets where one can hear the melodies of the village fiddlers joyously dancing on roofs bathed in moonlight, vibrantly coloured cows, milkmaids and reapers, dark blue sky littered with stars is the only place where lovers find abode, love makes you feel like you’re flying into the clouds, and boyish crushes and dreams are whispered solely to the moon when the cows, roosters and hens are sleeping in silence. Innocence, cheerfulness, whimsicality, everything-is-possible mood pervades his canvases. It’s everyday reality, with its ugliness and banality, seen through pink glasses, similar to the worlds that Gabriel Garcia Márquez has created in his writings. Chagall uses paint instead of words, but portrays the similar fantasy world where colours transition softly one to another, like two cheeks touching tenderly, from white to red, blue to white, the transitions are as velvety soft as the border between dreams and reality is when one first opens one’s eyes in the morning and through tired flickering eyelashes sees rays of sunlight coming through the window.

Marc Chagall, Over the town, 1918

This is the world seen through the eyes of a gentle and dreamy boy whose great scope of imagination enabled him to escape the dreariness of his surroundings and to walk forever on the tightrope between the real world and the world of daydreams. Chagall is the Dreamer who took up painting, a Peter Pan amongst artists; a boy who refused to grow up and forever carried a light of childhood that shone through his kind blue eyes like a firefly shines in warm summer dusks in the mysterious corners of the garden. When Bella spoke of his eyes, she said they were strange, almond-shaped, and “blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky”. It’s that light from within and a stubborn faithfulness to the world of daydreams and memories of his little village that made his transcend the poverty, wars and ugliness of his own everyday reality. His tender love for Bella, his memories and childlike naivety and curiosity all fed into his art. In these poetic visions of his provincial desolation, logic makes no sense so you may throw it into the rubbish bin and you may do the same with the perspective and proportions. In “Over the Town”, Marc and Bella are flying over the picturesque village that looks as if it came out of a Russian fairy tale with wooden cottages and fences that stretch on and on, like rainbows, as the two are flying towards their castle on a cloud.

Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1912

Don’t you remember how beautiful it was to be a child and believe in everything? I honestly believed I would one day live in a castle and wear old-fashioned dresses, and that I could be everything I want. I also remember vividly how I slowly stopped believing and through tears came to a bitter realisation, which hurt like a bee sting, that the future is actually very limited and that I will probably never be as carefree again as I was that summer when I was ten and my afternoons were spent trying to find a four-leaf clover; a quest in which I happily succeeded once. These are my thoughts at the moment, and there is no answer because time cannot be returned, childhood cannot be relived, and also there are many beautiful things about now; the flowers, the meadows, the river, have not lost their charm for me after all those years.

I just remembered something that Anais Nin said in an interview from 1972; she referred to Baudelaire’s saying that in every one of us there is a man, a woman and a child. She said the child in us never dies but goes on making fantasies, in all of us, but most wouldn’t admit it. The artists are the ones who admit it, but it takes courage to share these fantasies and dreams with the world, serve them on a plate for all to see, expose oneself, only to potentially be ridiculed or judged. So, perhaps the key to nurturing and preserving the child inside is seeing Beauty everywhere around you, being excited and captivated by little things, and to believe – because children always believe, whether it’s in fairy tales or in themselves.

For more on Chagall’s art and his years in Paris, read this.

Happy Birthday, Marc Chagall!

A dreamer amongst artists, a poet of colours, a kind soul with a psychedelic imagination: Marc Chagall, was born on 7th July 1887. Let us dive into the beauty of his art, be high as kites for a while, and then close our eyes and become a part of his world of love, dreams, flowers and the rapturous ecstatic blue colour.

Marc Chagall, Bouquet près de la fenêtre, 1959-60

I think this is a good moment to read about Chagall’s years in Paris and the whimsicality of his art. If you are perhaps interested in the mystery behind his birthdate and the symbolism of number seven in his art, you can read about it here. And this is a post I wrote about Chagall last February:

Marc Chagall – The Paris Years (1910-1914)

‘At that time I had grasped that I had to go to Paris. The soil that had nourished my art was Vitebsk; but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water. I had no other reason for leaving my homeland, and I believe that in my paintings I have always remained true to it.’ (Marc Chagall, My Life)

Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window, 1913

It’s 1910 and Marc Chagall has just arrived in Paris. After a four day journey by railway from Saint Petersburg, he settled in the first available atelier. Paris was the Mecca for young artists; dominant art form at the time was Cubism, all sorts of avant-garde movement, both in painting and poetry, were emerging and art circles of Paris had just began migrating from Montmartre to a chic area called Montparnasse which would remain a home to many artists in the years that followed.

Chagall visited ‘Salon des Indépendants’ (Society of Independent Artists), just a day after he arrived in the ‘capital of arts’. He visited Louvre as well. He realised there, in front of the canvases by Manet, Monet, Pissaro and Millet, why for all those years Russian art seemed foreign to him, why he couldn’t connect with it. Language of his paintings was foreign and bizarre to Russian artists. Chagall soon enrolled at Academie de La Palette, an avant-garde art school. Other notable pupils of the school were: Sonia Delaunay, Roger de La Fresnaye and Lyubov Popova.

Marc Chagall, Still-life (Nature morte), 1912

Still, not everything was as rose-tinted as it may seem. In addition to being penniless and not speaking French, Chagall was very lonely and often his thoughts wandered back to his home in Vitebsk, his Hasidic experiences, Russian folklore, and his beloved Bella. ‘All that prevented me from returning immediately was the distance between Paris and my home town’, he wrote in his autobiography My Life.

After living in a small atelier in Montmarte, Chagall moved into one of the studios in artist’s residence called ‘La Ruche’ (literary Bee Hive, named after the shape of the building), in Montparnasse. This atelier was more spacious than the previous one, which meant he was able to use larger canvases. Night after night he painted until dawn. Sometimes he used cut-out sheets and his nightshirts instead of proper canvases. His atelier was often disorderly; eggshells and tins of cheap soup could be found lying around. On the wooden table reproductions of El Greco and Cezanne’s painting laid scattered around. Sometimes, after a night spent painting furiously, he thought of buying warm croissants on the loan, but went to bed instead. In the market, he could only afford to buy a cucumber, as he once said. Other mornings, he hoped his friend Blaise Cendrars would come around and take him to breakfast. Also, Chagall painted naked because he despised being dressed, and he had poor taste when it came to clothing. One of his neighbours in La Ruche was Chaim Soutine, a ‘wilful and grouchy eccentric’ and a fellow Eastern Jew.

Various sounds could be heard coming from the ateliers: humiliated models wept in Russian studios, Italian ateliers echoed with songs, romance and sounds of guitar, in Jewish – discussions and quarrels, while Chagall painted in solitude and silence.

Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1912

Chagall couldn’t have chosen a better moment to come to Paris. Russian artists were welcomed with great enthusiasm. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, formed in 1909, sparked a passion for all things Russian and exotic. Diaghilev brought together dancers, choreographers, musicians, writers and painters. Ballets such as Scheherazade, Les Orientales and Stravinsky’s The Firebird caused sensation. Exotic mood, colourful costumes, emphasis on the individual dancer and expressive dance movements changed public’s notion of ballet, and opened doors for many young artists to express themselves. Leon Bakst, Chagall’s former teacher in Saint Petersburg, came to Paris and worked as a scene-painter for Russian Ballet.

Chagall once visited Diaghilev’s ballet, hoping to encounter Bakst and Nijinsky. Behind the scenes he stumbled upon rosy-cheeked and red-haired Bakst who smiled to him. Then Nijinsky came along, but quickly returned to the stage where he performed a dance from the ballet ‘Le spectre de la rose’ with Tamara Karsavina. Italian poet Gabrielle D’Annuzio was flirting with Ida Rubinstein. Bakst considered hiring Chagall as his helper in scene-painting, but he quickly dismissed the idea when he saw how unskilled Chagall was.

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1913

Interestingly, Marc Chagall’s circle of friends in Paris was mostly comprised of poets and writers, not merely painters. His closest friends were Guillaume Apollinaire, poet, novelist and art critic whom Chagall called ‘gentle Zeus’, and Swiss-born poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars, whom many considered as Rimbaud’s direct heir in poetry style. Sonia and Robert Delaunay were one of his painter-friends. Chagall was drawn to Sonia for various reasons: they were almost the same age, both grew up in Jewish homes and both had studied art in St. Petersburg.

Unlike Sonia, who fully delved into Orphism along with her husband Robert, Chagall’s paintings from ‘The Paris Years’ burst with motifs reminiscent of his childhood in Vitebsk. Painting ‘I and the Village’, a psychedelic Cubist fairytale, with soft, velvety colour transitions, is a whimsical kaleidoscope of colourful houses painted upside-down, Ortodox church, man’s face with a green mask, upside-down female violin-player, man carrying a scythe, and a Jewish element – The Tree of Life. Chagall’s style is unlike anything else in art history, and just like Modigliani, he is a painter whose art cannot be placed in a specific art movement. Nourishment of his art was childhood memories and imagination. This painting is a visual representation of his thought ‘The soil that had nourished my art was Vitebsk; but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water.‘

Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911

I just finished reading his autobiography ‘My Life’, and I can’t express how much I’m enchanted with his art and him as a person. His humanity is what I admire the most. To me, he is an embodiment of Terence’s quote ‘I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me.’ (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.)

Marc Chagall, The Drunkard (Le saoul), 1911-12

MARC CHAGALL (poem by Blaise Cendrars)

He is asleep

Now he is awake

And suddenly he is painting

He reaches for a church paints with a church

He reaches for a cow and paints with a cow

With a sardine

With skulls hands knives

Paint with a nerve of an ox

All the besmirched sufferings of little

Jewish towns

Tormented by burning love from the depth

of Russia

For France

Death heart and desires

He paints with his thighs

Has his eyes in his behind

There it is your face

It is You dear reader

It is I

It is he

His own betrothed

The grocer on the corner

The milkmaid

Midwife

Newborn babies are being washed in

buckets of blood

Heavenly madness

Mouths gush forth fashions

The Eiffel Tower is like a corkscrew

Hands heaped on each other

Christ

He himself Jesus Christ

He lived a long youth on the cross

Every new day another suicide

And suddenly he is no longer painting

He was awake

Now he is asleep

Strangles himself with a tie

Chagall astonished

Born on my immortality.’

Marc Chagall – The Colour of Love

“In our life there is a single colour, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love.” (Marc Chagall)

Marc Chagall, Birthday, 1915

Earlier this year, in February, I was mesmerised by Chagall’s paintings and wrote two posts about him, The Paris Years (1910-1914) and Mystical Seven, this post – The Colour of Love – was an idea I had but never got round to. Well, these days I found myself daydreaming about Chagall’s portraits of lovers, and the mystic blueness of his paintings again, so consider this the third part of my Chagall trilogy.

Marc Chagall is one of those people who are full of love; love for life, colours, people, nature, memories, dreams, art, love towards sky, and night, and his village, and houses and his parents, composition and form, and colours, oh, he adored colours! Chagall’s paintings are landscapes of love, dreams and poetry. With Chagall, everything starts and ends with love – it’s pervading in his choice of subject, as he was fond of paintings his wife Bella and dreamy lovers flying above Paris, and always in his approach.

There’s a hint of Romanticism in his way of thinking, he said himself: ‘If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.‘ His paintings are so whimsical, dreamy and psychedelic really, that it’s hard to place them in a specific art movement; he was neither a Cubist nor a Surrealist and even though he always painted surrealistic scenes; lovers, cows and houses flying in air, fiddler on the roof, bodies and objects painted without respect for form, he steered clear from all formal classifications and manifestos. He stood as a loner and a dreamer.

Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (The Wedding Party on the Eiffel Tower) by Marc Chagall, 1928

Love at first sight that started in 1909 when a beautiful daughter of a rich jeweller met a poor aspiring painter who worked as an apprentice for Leon Bakst, lasted thirty five years. What ended their love affair was not the change of feelings, but Bella’s death. In his autobiography ‘My Life’, which I highly recommend you to read, he poetically writes about her: ‘Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me; as if she has always watched over me, somewhere next to me, though I saw her for the very first time. I knew this is she, my wife. Her pale colouring, her eyes. How big and round and black they are! They are my eyes, my soul.’

Bella, although seemingly a quiet, pale and withdrawn girl, was enthusiastic about Chagall as well, and later wrote about being mesmerised by his ethereal pale blue eyes: ‘When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes … long, almond-shaped … and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat.‘ She also wrote of their first meeting: ‘I was surprised at his eyes, they were so blue as the sky … I’m lowering my eyes. Nobody is saying anything. We both feel our hearts beating.‘

Marc Chagall, Bella with White Collar, 1917

After years spent in Paris, between 1910 and 1914, Chagall and Bella finally married on 25 July 1915, despite having a hard time convincing her parents that he would make a good match. They didn’t care about their love, but were more worried about his career and social status. Still, less than a year later, on 18th May 1916, their first and only child, Ida, was born and the arrival of this little bundle of joy softened the bourgeois hearts of Bella’s parents.

Chagall was absolutely besotted with Bella, he thought about her all the time while in Paris, and when they finally married, he expressed this endless amount of love and joy that suddenly overwhelmed him through his art. In painting ‘Birthday’, we see figures of Bella and Chagall in a kiss, the strength of their love allows them to defy gravity; he is already flying of happiness, while she seems ready to join him, carrying a bouquet of flowers in her hand. Chagall painted their room with religious devotion to details, and the space seems oddly real; notice the intricately woven fabric on the right, then the knife and a little purse on the table, and the view from the room. Chagall describes his new-found happiness in a way a poet would, just using colours instead of words, and he tells us: it’s real and it’s here, for the first time.

Marc Chagall, Blue Landscape, 1949

Reading ‘My Life’ and observing his paintings from that period, you can sense his utter rapture and adoration for Bella. He even seems surprised that she could love him, this poor and clumsy boy who dreams of being a painter. He writes:

“In the mornings and evenings she would bring to my studio cakes she had baked with loving care, fried fish, boiled milk, colourful fabrics, and even boards of wood to use as an easel. All I had to do was open my window and in streamed the blueness of the sky, love and flowers with her. Dressed all in white or all in black, she has long been haunting my paintings, the great central image of my art.” (My Life)

Marc Chagall, The Promenade, 1917-18

You can really imagine him painting cows, fiddlers, lovers and poets in serenity all day, immersed in colour, meditating in every brushstroke, and the sparkle in his sky blue eyes when she’d enter the room. If only this beautiful dream, painted indeed in the colour of love, lasted forever. In both paintings, ‘Birthday’ and ‘Bella in White Collar’ we see Bella’s dress as he’d described it in the book. In painting ‘The Promenade’, he’s holding her hand like a balloon, with a wide smile on his face, while the town shaped in a Cubist style and painted in emerald green sleeps in the background.

It must have been wonderful to be loved by this gentle and humble dreamer with a vivid imagination. Lucky Bella.

Marc Chagall, Lovers with Half Moon, 1926

Chagall often paints lovers surrounded by a mystical blue colour, with a moon in the background, perhaps referring to his own love story with Bella again. In ‘My Life’, which is not a typical autobiography but a vibrant kaleidoscope of memories, he writes of kissing Bella at night, and also, one time, her parents locked the house and she couldn’t get outside to meet him so she got out through the window. Naturally, neighbourhood was gossiping, that’s not unusual for a small town like Vitebsk, and nobody would believe Chagall that his fiancee remained even more pure than Raphael’s Madonna, to quote Chagall himself. A reminder: this all takes place in 1909, and people tend to think that modern world is completely different, well I guess it isn’t. Love was love, and dreams were dreams – two main forces behind Chagall’s work.

Marc Chagall, Blue Lovers, 1914

Chagall’s anti-rational approach to art, typical for Surrealists, is perhaps best noticeable in his portrayals of dreamy lovers bathed in mystic blues. After his Parisian period (1910-1914) during which he flirted with Cubism, and enjoyed adding hints of geometry here and there, he suddenly freed his art even more, because it wasn’t stern to begin with. He felt an attraction for free forms, and purposefully employed the language of fantasy and games to develop a distinctively dreamy mood that still makes his paintings stand out.  It’s that playful quality of Chagall’s art that drew me to it in the first place, but it’s not a shallow playfulness because it’s always tinged with a transcending appeal of the mystical blue colour he loved using in abundance. If you take a look at the paintings ‘Blue Lovers’ or ‘Lovers in Green’, it’s hard not to feel that dreamy, ethereal quality that lingers through his paintings.

Marc Chagall, Lovers in green, 1914-1915

After living in Vitebsk and St Petersburg, he left Russia for good in 1922 and settled in Paris, soon followed by Bella and Ida. Because of the political situation in Europe, he moved to New York in 1941. Unfortunately, a love dream that started in 1909, ended all too soon – Chagall and Bella didn’t grow old together.

A muse that filled his life and canvases with love for more than three decades vanished from this material world on 2 September 1944. When she died, Chagall turned all his canvases back to the wall and stopped painting for six months; it was the only period of his life, since he started painting, that he didn’t pick up a brush. He did remarry, in 1952 to Valentina ‘Vava’ Brodsky, but in every painting there’s a spirit of Bella’s light and warmth. She died, but she continued to pervade his thoughts and his canvases, and memories of her love guided his art like a star guiding the sailors.

Marc Chagall “Le bouquet d’amour”, c. 1960

What is the colour of love, then? It depends on the painter. For Chagall it seems to have been – blue.

Marc Chagall – The Mystical Seven

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1913

Despite the luminous yellows and deep red colours dominant in Chagall’s self-portrait, it’s impossible not to notice that his left hand has seven fingers, which means there’s two fingers too many, unless you’re in a psychedelic state of mind. There are many interpretations that explain why he painted seven fingers, but truth is, only Chagall knew. I believe it is connected to his fondness of number seven, and belief it its mystic qualities. Officially, Marc Chagall was born in Liozna, near Vitebsk, on 7 July 1887.

It’s likely that Chagall’s father modified the year of Chagall’s birth, changing it from 1889 to 1887, because in that case Chagall’s older brother would receive some kind of benefits. Chagall himself wrote that he was seventeen years old when he arrived in St. Petersburg in 1906, which could serve as an argument for this thesis, but he eventually decided to keep the year of his birth which was written in his passport, 1887 that is. And I believe that he modified his date of birth just for the additional number seven. I think he was actually born on 6 July, but wilfully changed it to 7 July. His real name was Moishe Segal, but, upon changing it, he added a second ‘l’ – Chagall, which makes it seven letters long. That mystical seven!!!

Marc Chagall painted this self-portrait during his ‘Paris Years’, in times when he ‘flirted’ with Cubism and tried to incorporate its elements, such as geometrical shapes and multiple points of view, in his work. Still, the mood of the painting isn’t Cubist. Warm, vibrant colours evoke his childhood, and his home town Vitebsk, a ‘picturesque city of churches and synagogues’. We can see Eiffel Tower through the window, while the right side shows a scene from Vitebsk, small wooden houses and a synagogue. Torn between two worlds, he even inscribed ‘Paris’ and ‘Russia’ in Hebrew letters on the top of the canvas, right above his head. Belorussia and his family were in his mind always. Even if we didn’t know that this was Chagall’s ‘official’ self-portrait, we could recognise his slightly feminine features, his curly hair, large eyes and long nose.

In this orgy of colours, yellow stands out. Luminous, radiant, translucent yellow. This potent yellow could only be compared to Vincent van Gogh’s yellow. Whereas his yellow had an undertow of franticness, like an eerie laughter, Chagall’s yellow is energetic and cheerful. And it dominates, almost shining through the artist, peeking from his shirt, appearing on his trousers, invading the palette. An the most beautiful wooden floor; a bit crooked and surreal luminous yellow floor. Cover 0f Syd Barrett’s ‘The Madcap Laughs’ evokes the allure of Chagall’s floor.

And if you’re wondering which painting is Chagall pictured painting, it’s the one called ‘To Russia, Donkeys and Others’, painted in 1911.

Marc Chagall, To Russia, Donkeys and Others, 1911

…more of that luminous, radiant, translucent yellow…

Marc Chagall, La Danse, 1950-52

Marc Chagall – The Paris Years (1910-1914)

‘At that time I had grasped that I had to go to Paris. The soil that had nourished my art was Vitebsk; but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water. I had no other reason for leaving my homeland, and I believe that in my paintings I have always remained true to it.’ (Marc Chagall, My Life)

Marc Chagall, Paris Through the Window, 1913

It’s 1910 and Marc Chagall has just arrived in Paris. After a four day journey by railway from Saint Petersburg, he settled in the first available atelier. Paris was the Mecca for young artists; dominant art form at the time was Cubism, all sorts of avant-garde movement, both in painting and poetry, were emerging and art circles of Paris had just began migrating from Montmartre to a chic area called Montparnasse which would remain a home to many artists in the years that followed.

Chagall visited ‘Salon des Indépendants’ (Society of Independent Artists), just a day after he arrived in the ‘capital of arts’. He visited Louvre as well. He realised there, in front of the canvases by Manet, Monet, Pissaro and Millet, why for all those years Russian art seemed foreign to him, why he couldn’t connect with it. Language of his paintings was foreign and bizarre to Russian artists. Chagall soon enrolled at Academie de La Palette, an avant-garde art school. Other notable pupils of the school were: Sonia Delaunay, Roger de La Fresnaye and Lyubov Popova.

Marc Chagall, Still-life (Nature morte), 1912

Still, not everything was as rose-tinted as it may seem. In addition to being penniless and not speaking French, Chagall was very lonely and often his thoughts wandered back to his home in Vitebsk, his Hasidic experiences, Russian folklore, and his beloved Bella. ‘All that prevented me from returning immediately was the distance between Paris and my home town’, he wrote in his autobiography My Life.

After living in a small atelier in Montmarte, Chagall moved into one of the studios in artist’s residence called ‘La Ruche’ (literary Bee Hive, named after the shape of the building), in Montparnasse. This atelier was more spacious than the previous one, which meant he was able to use larger canvases. Night after night he painted until dawn. Sometimes he used cut-out sheets and his nightshirts instead of proper canvases. His atelier was often disorderly; eggshells and tins of cheap soup could be found lying around. On the wooden table reproductions of El Greco and Cezanne’s painting laid scattered around. Sometimes, after a night spent painting furiously, he thought of buying warm croissants on the loan, but went to bed instead. In the market, he could only afford to buy a cucumber, as he once said. Other mornings, he hoped his friend Blaise Cendrars would come around and take him to breakfast. Also, Chagall painted naked because he despised being dressed, and he had poor taste when it came to clothing. One of his neighbours in La Ruche was Chaim Soutine, a ‘wilful and grouchy eccentric’ and a fellow Eastern Jew.

Various sounds could be heard coming from the ateliers: humiliated models wept in Russian studios, Italian ateliers echoed with songs, romance and sounds of guitar, in Jewish – discussions and quarrels, while Chagall painted in solitude and silence.

Marc Chagall, The Fiddler, 1912

Chagall couldn’t have chosen a better moment to come to Paris. Russian artists were welcomed with great enthusiasm. Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, formed in 1909, sparked a passion for all things Russian and exotic. Diaghilev brought together dancers, choreographers, musicians, writers and painters. Ballets such as Scheherazade, Les Orientales and Stravinsky’s The Firebird caused sensation. Exotic mood, colourful costumes, emphasis on the individual dancer and expressive dance movements changed public’s notion of ballet, and opened doors for many young artists to express themselves. Leon Bakst, Chagall’s former teacher in Saint Petersburg, came to Paris and worked as a scene-painter for Russian Ballet.

Chagall once visited Diaghilev’s ballet, hoping to encounter Bakst and Nijinsky. Behind the scenes he stumbled upon rosy-cheeked and red-haired Bakst who smiled to him. Then Nijinsky came along, but quickly returned to the stage where he performed a dance from the ballet ‘Le spectre de la rose’ with Tamara Karsavina. Italian poet Gabrielle D’Annuzio was flirting with Ida Rubinstein. Bakst considered hiring Chagall as his helper in scene-painting, but he quickly dismissed the idea when he saw how unskilled Chagall was.

Marc Chagall, Self-Portrait with Seven Fingers, 1913

Interestingly, Marc Chagall’s circle of friends in Paris was mostly comprised of poets and writers, not merely painters. His closest friends were Guillaume Apollinaire, poet, novelist and art critic whom Chagall called ‘gentle Zeus’, and Swiss-born poet and novelist Blaise Cendrars, whom many considered as Rimbaud’s direct heir in poetry style. Sonia and Robert Delaunay were one of his painter-friends. Chagall was drawn to Sonia for various reasons: they were almost the same age, both grew up in Jewish homes and both had studied art in St. Petersburg.

Unlike Sonia, who fully delved into Orphism along with her husband Robert, Chagall’s paintings from ‘The Paris Years’ burst with motifs reminiscent of his childhood in Vitebsk. Painting ‘I and the Village’, a psychedelic Cubist fairytale, with soft, velvety colour transitions, is a whimsical kaleidoscope of colourful houses painted upside-down, Ortodox church, man’s face with a green mask, upside-down female violin-player, man carrying a scythe, and a Jewish element – The Tree of Life. Chagall’s style is unlike anything else in art history, and just like Modigliani, he is a painter whose art cannot be placed in a specific art movement. Nourishment of his art was childhood memories and imagination. This painting is a visual representation of his thought ‘The soil that had nourished my art was Vitebsk; but my art needed Paris as much as a tree needs water.‘

Marc Chagall, I and the Village, 1911

I just finished reading his autobiography ‘My Life’, and I can’t express how much I’m enchanted with his art and him as a person. His humanity is what I admire the most. To me, he is an embodiment of Terence’s quote ‘I am human, and nothing of that which is human is alien to me.’ (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.)

Marc Chagall, The Drunkard (Le saoul), 1911-12

MARC CHAGALL (poem by Blaise Cendrars)

He is asleep

Now he is awake

And suddenly he is painting

He reaches for a church paints with a church

He reaches for a cow and paints with a cow

With a sardine

With skulls hands knives

Paint with a nerve of an ox

All the besmirched sufferings of little

Jewish towns

Tormented by burning love from the depth

of Russia

For France

Death heart and desires

He paints with his thighs

Has his eyes in his behind

There it is your face

It is You dear reader

It is I

It is he

His own betrothed

The grocer on the corner

The milkmaid

Midwife

Newborn babies are being washed in

buckets of blood

Heavenly madness

Mouths gush forth fashions

The Eiffel Tower is like a corkscrew

Hands heaped on each other

Christ

He himself Jesus Christ

He lived a long youth on the cross

Every new day another suicide

And suddenly he is no longer painting

He was awake

Now he is asleep

Strangles himself with a tie

Chagall astonished

Born on my immortality.’