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| Marc Chagall, Over the Town, 1918 |
In our life there is a single color, as on an artist's
palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
On a family
vacation over the summer, I skipped some of the more frivolous activities
offered on the Allure of the Seas and, as a budding art historian, instead attended
art lectures and three-hour auctions for paintings that I could never afford.
During one of those lectures, the Park West Gallery representative painted a
picture of the life of Marc Chagall, an artist with whom I became familiar the
year before in Paris. Before the cruise, I had known Chagall simply as the man
who recreated the ceiling of l’Opéra Garnier and painted colorful floating
people, but as one of few audience members I learned about his tragic life and
relationship with Bella Rosenfeld.
Chagall was born
in Liozna, Russia (now Belarus) in 1887 and moved to Paris in 1910 to advance
his artistic career. In 1914, he returned to Russia to marry Bella and bring
her back to France with him. World War One broke out during Chagall’s trip to Vitebsk,
and he could not leave the country. Marc and Bella did not return to France
until 1923, and they once again escaped war when they left Nazi-occupied Paris
for New York City in 1941. War eventually reached them in 1944 when Bella
contracted a virus and died due to wartime medicine shortages. In addition to
his wife’s death, the Holocaust sent Chagall into a deep depression, and, after
a short hiatus, he painted only Bella to preserve her memory and the memory of
his people.
Chagall’s
comments about his wife were almost as colorful as his paintings. After he
first met Bella, Chagall said, “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.” He
created floating couples in his works to capture the celestial feeling of his
love. In the early years of their marriage, Chagall included flowers in his
paintings to celebrate their union, but these turned to funeral flowers after
the war.
I had never learned
to connect an artist’s personal situation with his/her work, and that lecture
allowed me to see Chagall’s story and love for his wife in the details of his art.
Over the Town, painted in 1918, captures
weightless bliss in Chagall’s gray hometown. The couple and a singular house provide the
color of this work the same way that Bella brightened her husband’s world. I
did not initially appreciate the appearance of this painting but learned that the
historical and personal contexts are often more important. This understanding guided
me through Art History, and the experience of that lecture brought me back every
day of the trip and led me to this year’s class to discover the stories behind
countless other paintings and sculptures.