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Marc Chagall, Colourful Summer Bouquet and a Pair of Lovers. Paper, colour lithograph,
70 × 58. Run of 132/250 copies. Signed in pencil: Marc Chagall. VGSJM
Marc Chagall (born in Liozna, Belarus, in 1887; died in Sen Pol de Vense, France, in 1985) was one of the best known artists of the 20th century. He developed a unique plot line and plastic expression. Each painting by Marc Chagall is a colourful story that takes the viewer into a maze of past and present, reality and phantasy all put together. The artist created his own universe where the laws of gravitation did not apply and where time flew and the whole space existed by the rules that were known to the artist alone. Marc Chagall’s lithograph Colourful Summer Bouquet and a Pair of Lovers is no exception to this rule either. It depicts a colourful bouquet of flowers with a pair of lovers, birds and animals soaring around it and the moon and the sun shining in the sky both at the same time.
In his autobiography Marc Chagall admitted that with his first wife Bella (Berta Rozenfeld, 1895–1944), who was the love of his life and his muse, he experienced the state of ‘extraordinary serenity, weightlessness and flight’. The artist identified the state of flight with love, passion and dreams. Therefore, in his paintings Marc Chagall depicted hundreds of pairs of lovers. Could it be that the pair of lovers was always the same and that it was always Marc and Bella? There are more than two thousand paintings with the image of Marc Chagall’s beautiful wife Bella for the viewers to admire. The artist even wrote the following poem to his wife:
Wife
You let your hair loose
For this meeting with me, and the moment I catch
Your glance and the quiver of your body,
I want to ask you time and again:
Where are my old flowers
That adorned the wedding chuppah?
I remember: that night you were so close to me,
And when I lied down by your side the very first time,
we put down the Moon,
and the candlelight quivered,
and my love yearned for you and only you,
because you were the one chosen by it.
And you became my wife.
My sweetest one.
Author of the text and translator of the poem from Russian:
Dr Vilma Gradinskaitė, Museologist at the History Research Department
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