Putting Love and Nostalgia into Dreams (Classic Flowing Fang)

The picture shows the work "Lovers and Bouquets". Profile picture

Mark Chagall's paintings are imbued with a fusion of reality and dreaminess: he integrates life into his work, looking for materials from natural images; using the canvas as a stage to construct a dream-like fairy tale world. Recently, Chagall's works have been exhibited in Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and other Chinese cities, showing more than 150 classic original works he created from 1925 to 1981, including oil paintings, watercolors, gouache, tempura, etchings and other media. In the exhibition hall, the audience seems to be surrounded by poetry and warmth, and the painter uses dreamlike colorful colors to light up the joy of the viewer's soul, and brings warmth to the cold winter day with a strong love and poetic nostalgia.

"The soil of my hometown nourishes the roots of my art"

Born in 1887 in Vitebsk, Belarus, to a poor but affectionate Jewish family, Chagall was influenced by the rich and varied Russian folk art. Chagall once described himself as "the soil of my hometown nourishes the roots of my art", and the multicultural and folk life of his youth has become an inexhaustible treasure of the painter's life.

Chagall said goodbye to his hometown early: in 1906 he went to St. Petersburg to study painting, and four years later he made his mark in Paris. After two world wars, he had to flee war and racial persecution, and settled in France in 1947 after most of his life. His hometown is a place that gives Chagall infinite love and warmth, and it is also a place where the wandering soul of a wanderer in a foreign land is haunted; it is the starting point of his artistic career and the eternal theme of his artistic creation. No matter what subject matter he painted, Chagall always inadvertently expressed a sense of homesickness: "I always think of you, dear hometown." My remembrance of you is in my paintings. ”

In Chagall's work, nostalgia is often expressed through a large number of image symbols. Country churches, rustic log cabins, goats, donkeys and cattle, ordinary farming tools, scenes of the life and labor of the villagers, and even the herring that often appear in the picture are full of nostalgia for his father, an ordinary worker in the herring warehouse. The collection of these images is repeated in Chagall's paintings, giving the work a faint sense of nostalgia.

In 1911, Chagall created "My Village and Me" in Paris, in which a cow and the painter's side face face face each other, the look is serene, the eyes are gentle, as if in a cordial dialogue, and the background reproduces the farmhouse and church in his hometown of Vitebsk. The painter used Cubism to divide the picture into different units, several huge rings suggesting the sun, moon and earth in orbit, while the landscape of Vitebsk seems to be placed on the other side of the earth, implying that the painter looks at his hometown from Paris. In 1946, Chagall said of the painting in a speech at the University of Chicago in the United States: "I chose cows, milking women, chickens and country houses, etc., because they are my homeland. No matter which painter has his own hometown, even if he is affected by different environments in the future, the essence of his hometown and the atmosphere of his hometown always remain in his works. ”

"She brought blue skies, love and flowers"

"Love" is another motif of Chagall's artistic creation, which stems from the sincere love between him and his wife Bella, which runs through the entire artistic career of the painter. From 1909 in their hometown at first sight, the two have loved each other for 35 years, enjoyed the joy of life and spent difficult years together. After Bella's death in 1944, Chagall did not put down the brush depicting his deceased wife, he still painted the sweetness of love, but also painted the poignant beauty of longing, until the end of his life.

Chagall's Bella is innocent and elegant, always wearing a beautiful long dress, her eyes are affectionate and full of charm, exuding the happiness and joy of love and being loved. In addition, the painter also created many series of paintings of lovers and weddings modeled by Bella. In the works such as "Sunday", "Lovers and Bouquets", "Lovers on a Yellow Background", "Bride and Groom and Angels" displayed in this Chagall exhibition, the lovers in the paintings either embrace each other affectionately, or accompany each other hand in hand, or float in the air, their love is bright and sweet, making the viewer feel joy from the bottom of their hearts.

Created in 1915, Birthday depicts chagall and Bella's happy life after their new marriage. Bella, dressed in a white-collared black dress with a bouquet of flowers in her hand, is about to give to Chagall as a birthday present, and happiness and happiness make her whole face shine, and the painter turns her head to kiss his beloved wife affectionately. The two were filled with sweet love and floated in the air like angels. Chagall once described his wife affectionately: "I just open the window of my room and she will appear there." She brought blue skies, love and flowers, dressed in white or black dresses, and soared through my paintings from the past to the present, illuminating my artistic path. ”

"Burning colors flying in the sky"

Chagall's art is full of innocent, poetic dreamy colors, and his paintings are full of innocent images such as people flying in the air, upside-down huts, swinging clocks, agile animals, lively circuses, etc., coupled with brilliant colors, creating a romantic dream world.

As a child, Chagall was funny and witty, and he did not lose his precious childlike heart when he became an adult. In the autobiography "My Life", there are often such light and poetic sentences as "burning colors flying in the sky" and "crouching in the lonely woods". The autobiography was written when the painter was 35 years old, when he still saw the world with a pair of children's eyes, recording the details of life and stringing together fragments of memories. Like the autobiographical style, Chagall's fine art works are mostly composed of a series of image fragments, often juxtaposing scenes of foreign lands and hometowns, dialogue between the deceased and the real people, intertwining imagination and reality, illusion and reality, and there is no lack of elegant carving in childish fun.

Chagall's environment of growth added a lot of fairy tales to his creations. His hometown is simple, and his elders believe that everything in nature is spiritual. Influenced by this, the hens strolling in Chagall's paintings, the dancing fish, the cattle and sheep looking at people tenderly, and the horses flying in the air are all living in harmony with humans in a mysterious dream world. The "Yiddish" of the homeland is a Germanic language derived from Middle German, and the expression is very unique, "flying over the house" means "visiting someone else's house", "my body is reversed" means "deeply moved", "the man has turned green and yellow" means "the state after a long prayer". The provenance of these images can be seen by comparing chagall's paintings of flying people, inverted bodies, and green faces.

Completed in the 1970s, "The Violet Rooster" is one of the biggest highlights of the exhibition. The work is based on bright blue, the painter transforms himself into a clown holding flowers, his wife Bella in a white wedding dress rides a green horse to meet him, the background is the circus theater and the jubilant crowd, the rooster in the upper left corner of the picture is the memory of his childhood hometown, the bright moonlight and the colorful bouquet create a romantic dream atmosphere, pinning the painter's deep love for his lover and hometown. Throughout his life, Chagall has pursued the innocence and simplicity of art, using brilliant colors to take people into a dream world filled with love and nostalgia. He once said: "If there is only one color on the palette of life that provides all meaning for life and art, this color is love." ”

Typography: Cai Huawei

People's Daily ( 2022-01-16 07 edition)