'I had only to open my bedroom window and blue air, love and flowers entered with her.' Floating lovers on flying horses, fiddlers on the roof, acrobats, jugglers, cows with parasols, bird women, blue violinists, 'blue air, love and flowers', swirling aerial streams of saturated colour, I love the lyrical and celebratory nature of Mark Chagall’s art. His dreamscape is a world about us and around us, not a world apart from us. The mystical, the fantastic, and the imaginary are grounded in physical and psychic memories, places and people we know but which undergo endless transformations, as indeed do we. Joyous, funny, sad, sentimental, sometimes tragic and reflective, the persecution and suffering of the Jews - of all humanity – turned into collective symbols of hope for a better, and eminently realisable, future. Mark Chagall is a 'poet-painter', a true visionary who gave form to the formless and in so doing exposed and expressed the inward, hitherto secret life of the psyche.
In Chagall’s world, cold logic was overturned by magic and transformed by metamorphosis, reality became myth, myth became reality and the word gave way to the image. In Chagall's universe the symbolic and the supernatural were familiar and everyday, but wondrous all the same.
For Chagall, imagination is transformation. Chagall the poet painter gave lyrical expression to a uniquely personal vision that reached out to touch the universal themes in all of us.
'Generally speaking colour directly influences the soul' (Wassily Kandinsky). Mark Chagall believed art to be 'above all a state of soul'. In Kandinsky’s musical analogy, Chagall was pre-eminently the 'maestro': 'Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul.'
'Everything in art ought to reply to every movement in our blood, to all our being, even our unconscious. For my part, I have slept very well without Freud!'
The Elusive Marc Chagall
With his wild and whimsical imagery, the Russian-born artist bucked the trends of 20th-century art.
‘Chagall himself said he was a dreamer who never woke up.’
Notes veteran art critic Pierre Schneider, “Chagall absorbed Cubism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Expressionism and other modern art trends incredibly fast when he was starting out. But he used them only to suit his own aesthetic purposes. That makes it hard for art critics and historians to label him. He can’t be pigeonholed.”
When he died in Saint Paul de Vence on March 28, 1985, at 97, Chagall was still working, still the avant-garde artist who refused to be modern. That was the way he said he wanted it: “To stay wild, untamed . . . to shout, weep, pray.”
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-elusive-marc-chagall-95114921/?all
Scott Walker, Angels of Ashes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtiI_03dNkE
Paintings by Mark Chagall
Song of Songs IV Cow with Parasol Time is a River Without Banks Acrobat I and the Village Poet with Birds
Marc Chagall biography
http://www.biography.com/people/marc-chagall-9243488
Here’s a dissenting view, from an art critic who has completely missed the point in my humble opinion.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10103321/Was-Chagall-actually-any-good.html