marc chagall’s blue world

~ jama

“Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love.” ~ Marc Chagall

“Lovers in Blue” (1914)

 

I’m a longtime Marc Chagall fan, and during this, my THINK BLUE year, I’m finding his work especially nourishing.

Who can resist his beautiful paintings– poetic inner dreamscapes replete with joy and childlike imagination? We are reminded that truth of vision is neither linear nor precise, but often abstract. He asks us to feel what he feels.

 

“Le Paysage Bleu” (1949)

 

French art critic Raymond Cogniat said this about Chagall’s work:

The most obviously constant element is his gift for happiness and his instinctive compassion, which even in the most serious subjects prevents him from dramatization . . .  Musicians have been a constant during all stages of his work. After he first got married, ‘lovers have sought each other, embraced, caressed, floated through the air, met in wreaths of flowers, stretched, and swooped like the melodious passage of their vivid day-dreams. Acrobats contort themselves with the grace of exotic flowers on the end of their stems; flowers and foliage abound everywhere.

Sigh. And he said this about Chagall’s use of color, which is what initially attracts the viewer and captures his 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. . . they indulge in flights of fancy and invention which add new perspectives and graduated, blended tones . . . His colors do not even attempt to imitate nature but rather to suggest movements, planes and rhythms.

Chagall was able to convey striking images using only two or three colors. Look what he was able to do with BLUE!

Sometimes up is down, and down is up. Chagall painted his heart on the canvas. He once said:

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 . . . If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

These days there seems to be a shortage of love in this country. A good antidote is to immerse oneself in Chagall’s work — the stunning, swirling blues of moonlight, romance, memory, compassion, holiness, fantasy, truth. A blue face, a blue angel, a blue village, all help to heal a broken world.

 

“Lovers in the Sky” (1928-30)

 

from Fables of La Fontaine (1997)

 

“Le Violoniste Bleu” (1947)

 

“Two Pigeons” (1925)

 

“Enfant avec une Colombe” (1977)

 

“Artist and His Model” (1973)

 

“Notre Dame et La Tour Eiffel” (1960)

 

“The Wedding” (1980)

 

“The Blue House” (1917)

 

“Window Over a Garden” (1917)

 

“Ebony Horse/Arabian Nights” (1948)

 

“The Painter” (1978)

 

“Le Rêve de Chagall sur Vitebsk” (1950-53)

 

“Acrobat with Bouquet” (1963)

 

“Lovers Among Lilacs” (1930)

 

“Self Portrait” (1959-1968)

 

“Monotypes en couleur” (1963)

 

“Le Champ de Mars” (1954-55)

 

“The Juggler of Paris” (1969)

 

“Le Cirque, Paris” (1967)

 

“Le Cirque, Paris” (1967)

 

“The Lovers” (1929)

 

“Lovers in Moonlight” (1938)

 

“Animal dans les fleurs” (1952-59)

 

“Blue Village” (1975)

 

“Around Her” (1945)

 

“Blue Face” (1967)

 

“Blue Angel” (1937)

 

“The Blue Studio” (1973)

 

“Les Amoureux en Bleu” (1930)

 

“I had only to open my bedroom window, and blue air, love, and flowers entered with her.” ~ Marc Chagall

*

 

HAPPY TUESDAY

HOPE YOU SOAR

THINK BLUE

🥣 🥣 🥣 🥣 🥣

Copyright © 2018 Jama Rattigan of Jama’s Alphabet Soup. All rights reserved.

21 thoughts on “marc chagall’s blue world”

  8. Thanks for this luscious blue post!! I love Chagall too!! Nothing better than flying goats and chickens!!

    I am so excited for Barb Rosenstock’s PB on Chagall–it’s coming out in September!! And Mary GrandPre is illustrating!!

    Liked by 1 person

  10. What a lot of work and thought you did for this beautiful post, Jama. It’s a sweet interlude in what’s going to be a busy day! Thank you! I love each in different ways, but ah, those ‘two pigeons’!

    Liked by 1 person

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