Marc Chagall

Music played an essential role in shaping Chagall's art and life.
Marc Chagall was a Belorussian-born French artist whose work generally was based on emotional association rather than traditional pictorial fundamentals.
During the Second World War, he was persecuted and suffered from many injustices. Yet throughout such upheaval, music remained a constant source of inspiration for Chagall, both for his compositions and the intensity and range of colors used in his sweeping body of work.
He is known for his bold and colorful brush strokes resulting in a unique and distinctive style it was his colors which attracted and captured the viewer's attention.

"The colors are a living, integral part of the picture and are never passively flat, or banal like an afterthought. They sculpt and animate the volume of the shapes".

Chagall loved Bach and Mozart, but it was the music of his small Hasidic Jewish community near Vitebsk, Russia, that first influenced him.

Here are some Hasidic songs and some of his masterpieces below.

"Over the town" is an important painting to understand who Chagall was as a man. In the upper part there's him with his wife Bella flying over the world, regardless of everything below them, merged as if they where a single thing.
Below them there's the city of Vitebsk, Chagall's native city. It is represented like grey and cold, only one house is coloured in red: his native home, where he was raised and loved as a child.
The painting is intentionally schematic to represent the dreaming atmosphere that love causes: love is so strong that makes Marc and Bella estrange from the boring city-life.

"Scène de Cirque" combines many of Chagall's most iconic artistic elements: the bold palette, the flowers, the horse, and even a violin player. He has always been fascinated by the circus because it took him into the parallel world of subconscious. From his childhood in Vitebsk to his life in Paris he frequently attended the circus.
"It is a magic world, the circus, a timeless dancing game where tears and smiles, the play of arms and legs take the form of a great art."
The characteristic blue background gives the work a dramatic atmosphere. The thick application of paint on the bouquet of flowers is echoed by the equally physical execution of the horse-riding woman's skirt. The scene is imbued with a palpable energy, deriving from the circus's ambiguous identity as simultaneously fun-loving and tragic.

"Le coq rouge dans la nuit" is a deeply suggestive painting that Chagall realized after his beloved wife died. It is interesting to notice that, in that dreaming blue-coloured atmosphere, the artist adds a violin, an element full of symbolism. Indeed, the violin is a symbol of communication with the Divine since it is considered the holder of the four natural elements's music.