MILAN – On 7 July we celebrated Chagall’s birthday and today, before this month ends, we want to remember him again, with a particular work, which speaks of love, of eternal feelings. The work in question is titled “The birthday”, and it is a canvas that Chagall painted precisely on his twenty-eighth birthday, in 1915. A major retrospective of Chagall is scheduled at Palazzo Reale in Milan from September, with over 220 works by period between 1908 and 1985, date of his death. HEART & ART– The month of July opens with the anniversary of the birth date of Marc Chagall, born on the 7th of 1887 in Belarus. Thus he writes: “Art seems to me to be above all a state of mind. Style is not important. Express it and. Painting must have a psychological content. I nip all my decorative impulses in the bud. I attenuate the white, we amalgamate the blue with a thousand thoughts. The psyche has to find its way into the paintings. You have to work on the painting thinking that something of your soul will become part of it and give it substance. A painting must flourish as something alive. He has to grasp something elusive: the charm and the profound meaning of what we care about. ” (Marc Chagall). Chagall reinterprets the artistic trends of his time in a completely personal way: geometric cuts, decompositions, the intersections of motifs in Chagall are enriched with fairy tales and overlap with childhood memories of the homeland. ‘If I create something, using the heart, it will work very easily, if I use the head it will be very difficult’. (Marc Chagall)THE BIRTHDAY – ”The birthday”, a medium-sized oil on canvas, now exhibited at MoMAin New York and the title of the work that Marc Chagall painted in 1915, representing his love for Bella Rosenfeld, whom I have loved for more than thirty years. A kiss on the lips, a man with his eyes closed lifts himself up to reach his beloved who, almost surprised, looks at him returning the kiss. A room in the background, where time seems to have stopped. A window with white curtains, you can see the street of a city, while on a table are abandoned a purse, probably hers, a tray with a cake and a knife. In the center, the two young people: she holds a bouquet of flowers in her hands, both suspended in the air, as if just hovering in flight, united by a kiss. We are in the summer of 1915 and those two lovers are none other than Marc and Bella Chagall. Chagall has just returned from a long stay in Paris. He met the Cubist painters, from whom he learned the freedom to decompose images and to force the boundaries of traditional perspective. And, above all, he came into contact with the exponents of the Fauves movement, Matisse in particular, who taught him to depict emotions through color. And that summer the emotions for him are many. He is happy to be back home and to savor the colors and smells of his city, Vitebsk (now in Belarus). For him, love and happiness are an integral part of that world. In that summer of 1915 he is finally about to marry his Bella and give a happy ending to their love story. They met in St. Petersburg, six years earlier, he was twenty-three, she was just fifteen: then they met several times in Vitebsk near the bridge, both of Jewish origin, but, otherwise, there is an abyss between them. They couldn’t be more different, yet, from the first meeting, the spark strikes between the two: he will tell in his autobiography of a young woman with ivory skin and big black eyes who immediately fascinated him. She will speak of love at first sight for that strange boy with unkempt curls and the ‘look of a fox in the sky-blue eyes’. You will be a great love of those that last for a lifetime. It’s her birthday when Chagall tries to portray this love. So let’s send our best wishes for a happy birthday to Marc Chagall. he will tell in his autobiography of a young woman with ivory skin and big black eyes who immediately fascinated him. She will speak of love at first sight for that strange boy with unkempt curls and the ‘look of a fox in the sky-blue eyes’. You will be a great love of those that last for a lifetime. It’s her birthday when Chagall tries to portray this love. So let’s send our best wishes for a happy birthday to Marc Chagall. he will tell in his autobiography of a young woman with ivory skin and big black eyes who immediately fascinated him. She will speak of love at first sight for that strange boy with unkempt curls and the ‘look of a fox in the sky-blue eyes’. You will be a great love of those that last for a lifetime. It’s her birthday when Chagall tries to portray this love. So let’s send our best wishes for a happy birthday to Marc Chagall.Giada Di Vita 27 July 2014
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