Painting: Midsummer Night’s Dreamer

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In the azure light that angles steeply down the slopes above the French Riviera, a sparkling translucence seizes nature. Rocks seem sodden with gold, flowers bloom like dabs on a palette, even grass glistens greener. This light takes hold of a man too. For Painter Marc Chagall, it is a daily baptism in color, an immersion in what is natural, uncontrived, and miraculously innocent.

Constitutionals have been a part of Chagall’s routine all his life. The country pleases him more than the city; and since 1950, he has lived in rustic Vence, an ancient town of Roman origins perched in the Maritime Alps. Each day, he sorties from the garden of his white-walled studio house, Les Collines (The Hills), past the orange trees whose fruits lie rotting on the ground, along lines of spear-like cypresses and sun-baked terraces exploding with olive trees, down to Avenue Henri Matisse, then cuts off to rocky, flower-lined paths unknown to tourists. After an hour, he re-emerges, sweat pearling on his pale forehead, but refreshed and ready for work.

Love Life Joyfully. For Chagall, to sniff the humid scent of fruit, hear the cicadas crackling in the bushes, and feel the feverish sun is a necessary daily act of spiritual rebirth. Not that he attempts to imitate nature; rather, he aims to continue it into the realm of the mind. “In the abstract,” he says, “one imitates but does not continue nature. Great art picks up where nature ends.” And for him, there is neither world enough nor time to transmute all that he sees, breathes and dreams. “I have no vacations, just as the earth has no vacations,” he says. “The earth keeps turning all the time, and we turn all the time—even when we are dead. The earth does not sleep. It turns with us.” And remarkably, at the age of 78, Chagall turns ever faster, feeling ever closer to the rhythm of nature.

If there is an occasional cloud, it is the thought of how swiftly time has flown since he first arrived, a bedazzled Russian Jew, to greet Paris a full half-century ago. Of the pre-World War I luminaries that were then his contemporaries—the Frenchmen Braque, Matisse, Léger, Rouault, Delaunay, Villon, the Spaniard Juan Gris, the Rumanian Sculptor Brancusi, the Italian Modigliani, the Russians Kandinsky and Soutine—only Picasso, now 83, remains of those who gave the School of Paris its start. Of the two principal survivors, Picasso is the most protean and cerebral, Chagall the most constant champion of the heart.

Critics have always hailed Chagall’s early inventive flights of fantasy, often comparing him to Stravinsky in music, but the art establishment until recently has tended to judge his major accomplishments over by 1922. His popularity, however, remained undimmed for the broadly buying art public, who often preferred his graphic works to Picasso’s. Even those who have charged him with sentimentality have never accused him of indifference to mankind.

Only belatedly have museums realized that the history of modern art would seem vacuously cold without Chagall’s tender, sometimes desperate exhortation to love life joyfully. “It’s absolutely essential to have him,” says Los Angeles County Museum Director Richard Brown. Adds a London dealer: “The one painter sought by all museums is Chagall. He has already become an old master.”

As the chronology of his art shows (see color pages), few modern artists have passed through so many seasons of art with such persistent vision. For Chagall has lived through all the century’s artisticisms, from cubism and surrealism to tachisme, and embraced none. Instead he has remained steadfast in the pursuit of his own midsummer night’s dream, emptying it and re-emptying it, until it has become a distillation, universal in its appeal. Today his art is enjoyed by millions all over the world—whenever they pick up one of the books he illustrated, pray in the sanctuaries he has touched with color, or listen to the music graced by his scenes and settings.

Rainbow Period. The man who has presented his work as a bouquet to the world is now just entering his rainbow period. His colors, blinding enough in his beginnings to win the approval of the German expressionists, grow steadily stronger. He is so well known today that even French working girls recognize him as “le type who paints cows that fly.”

There are pots of gold, too, to grace his rainbow period. Museums, which were at first slow to acquire his paintings, now find them skyrocketing out of sight and pocket. Today his oils regularly fetch from $50,000 to $55,000, and his record auction price of $82,500 last April has already been nearly doubled in private sales. His original signed and numbered lithographs bring up to $1,200; his watercolors are priced as high as $15,000.

Chagall’s reaction to all this is to work harder. “He takes so many commissions so that he will not have time to die,” says a New York dealer and longtime friend. Although Chagall does not seek them out, he now finds himself engulfed with the monumental public commissions that rarely come to crown the career of a great artist. Only in his 60s did he learn to stain glass. Since then, in a torrent of production, he has done two windows for the Metz Cathedral, followed by twelve windows for the Hadassah Medical Center’s synagogue in Jerusalem. Last fall he finished a memorial glass panel at the United Nations for the late Dag Hammarskjold and another for the Rockefeller family’s church. In total, his stained glass immeasurably enriches this century’s wealth in an arcane craft. He has tackled another long-neglected art: weavers in the famous Gobelins tapestry works are even now finishing a triptych of Old Testament hangings for Israel’s Knesset.

Magic Flutist. By far his most thrilling public work was the commission, assigned him by France’s Minister of Culture André Malraux, to redecorate the ceiling at the Paris Opera. This vast pantheon to music swirls with 2,153 sq. ft. of ballet dancers, firebirds and blossoms banked like clouds in hot Midi colors that triumph over the surrounding Second Empire gilt moldings (TIME, Nov. 6). In the mural he painted the face of his old friend Malraux—the gesture of a Renaissance artist paying homage to his patron. But as a grateful adopted son of France, Chagall made a truly princely gesture: he presented the ceiling, a year’s labor, to France as a gift. Without fanfare, Chagall often turns up at opera performances, whips out a spyglass to study his masterpiece furtively.

Now he has turned to another opera house. For New York’s new Metropolitan at the Lincoln Center, he is designing more than 75 costumes and 13 sets for its forthcoming production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. And when the Met opens in 1966, its facade will boast a brace of 30-ft. by 35-ft. murals, swarming with the turbulent will-o’-the-wisps of his own endless fantasy. From their vantage on the Met’s grand tier, the over-two-story-high murals will glow through the glassed vaults to dominate a city vista more spacious than the Piazza San Marco in Venice.

Icons of Youth. Such magnificence is a far cry from the provincial Russian ghetto town of Vitebsk in which Chagall grew up, the eldest among eight sisters and one brother. To support the family, his father manhandled herring barrels for a livelihood. Life was harsh in Vitebsk, but he remembers his father, who changed his name from Segal to Chagal (Marc added the second l for euphony in French), as a good provider, a “simple heart, poetic and muted.” Sheltered by the Jewish commandment against graven images, the young dreamer never saw so much as a drawing until, one day, he watched a schoolmate copying a magazine illustration. When he was ridiculed for his astonishment, “it roused a hyena in me,” and he began copying and improvising from magazines.

The Russian icon with its blank-eyed stare and stiff frontal figures was, next to shop signs, the art he knew best. Those Eastern images lean away from pictorial realism toward symbolism, and he loved them, as he says, because they are both “magical and unreal.”

Eventually he wheedled his parents into letting him study at real art schools: first, with a provincial portraitist and genre painter auspiciously named Pen, later at an academy in St. Petersburg. He proved an apt pupil, but from the beginning found his own world of fantasy in the unlikely, barren, mud-splattered town of his birth. For to Chagall, even Vitebsk’s corrugated iron roofs were beautiful. “All about us—churches, fences, shops, synagogues—simple and eternal,” he wrote, “like the buildings in the frescoes of Giotto.” Just as Dublin provided a lifelong source of art for James Joyce, Chagall has returned endlessly to Vitebsk. Recalling his youth in a fanciful autobiography, My Life, written in 1922 when he was 35, he established in its opening sentences his immense empathy for his folk origins. “The first thing I ever saw,” he wrote, “was a trough. Simple, square, half hollow, half oval. A market trough. Once inside, I filled it completely.”

Fiddler on the Roof. Even everyday happenings became magical when viewed through the lens of his poetic eye. And indeed the alternately joyful and mournful Hasidic community in which he lived furnished enough material for any youngster’s imaginings. There was his grandfather, a butcher who once disappeared during a Jewish festival, was later discovered sitting on a rooftop, quietly munching carrots. There was Uncle Neuch, who “played the violin like a shoemaker.” (Later Chagall was to say that he works on his pictures from all sides, “as shoemakers do.”) And there were the commonplaces that usher a young boy into adulthood.

One such event later became the subject of his first real masterwork, The Dead Man, painted in 1908 when he was 21. It shows a corpse lying in the street surrounded by candles. Near by, a woman shrieks. In the distance is Uncle Neuch, fiddling on the rooftop of a store bearing a shoemaker’s sign. Wrote Chagall of the actual incident: “The dead man, solemnly sad is already laid out on the floor, his face illumined by six candles. In the end, they carry him away. Our street is no longer the same. I do not recognize it.” The encounter with death bent his brush to his first flurries of forceful expressionism.

Into the Beehive. Folk art might have proved Chagall’s finale. But in 1910, a St. Petersburg lawyer named Vinaver became his first important patron, paid for a trip to Paris and sent him a handsome allowance of 125 francs (in those days about $24) each month. East and West met in Chagall’s art in Paris after he visited the Salon d’Automne. There, Bonnard, Matisse and dozens more enthralled him. The process of melding the illogical, emotional art of Russia with the logical discipline of the School of Paris began.

He found a studio near Montparnasse in La Ruche (“The Beehive”), a famous twelve-sided wooden structure divided into wedge-shaped rooms. Chaim Soutine, a fellow Russian Jew, and Modigliani lived on the same floor, but Chagall, still diffident and unsure, preferred to pal around with poets. His closest friend at the time was the Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars, whom Chagall let title some of his paintings. In return, Cendrars drew his word portrait of the artist in 1913:

He’s asleep

He’s awake

Right away he’s painting

He grabs a church and paints with the church

He grabs a cow and paints with the cow

With a sardine

With heads, hands, knives

He paints with an oxtail

With all the dirty passion of a little Jewish town

With all the exacerbated sexuality of provincial Russia.

No Square Peas. With such paintings as I and the Village, done in 1911, Chagall launched his own inimitable style. The painting blazes with a spectrum that vaults beyond the impressionists’ naturalistic colored light and into a mystic realm. The imagery performs flip-flops, a peasant woman turns topsy below inverted roofs. Perspective is abandoned to a personal scale that adjusts the size of images to their importance. So a huge cow and a man nuzzle, centering on a vortex of color that abolishes depth. Like the flat saints of old Russian icons, his images beckon contemplation, summoning memories from the mind. It is the scenery of a child building dreams in a darkened bedroom.

Chagall learned some of the discipline of the cubists. But he resisted their dissection of form. “Let them eat their fill of their square peas on their triangular tables!” he wrote. Nevertheless, something of Cartesian logic crept into his fantasies; his pictures took on orderly geometry; his images lost traditional figure-ground relationships and, instead, flattened against the picture plane in search of purely visual values. Said Chagall: “For me, a painting is a surface covered with representations of things— objects, animals, human beings— in a certain order in which logic and illustration have no importance.”

Cubism, however, was queen of art at the time; Chagall, who only knew Picasso casually, was out of the swim. His paintings at the Salon des Indépendants drew little acclaim and no money. Today, his paintings of 1910-14 are the most valuable and the most fascinating to art historians, who see in them the first stirrings of surrealism. The first person to recognize them at the time was Guillaume Apollinaire, poet and influential art critic, who muttered that Chagall was “supernatural.” Apollinaire rushed home to dash off a poem titled Rotsoge (a poetic moniker, deliberately foreign-sounding, by which he addressed Chagall), describing him as having hair like “the trolley cable across Europe arrayed in little many-colored fires.” He did Chagall a better favor by instigating a show in 1914 in Berlin. It was a sensation with the German expressionists.

Patriotic Bunting. Chagall continued back to Vitebsk from Berlin, then war broke out leaving his work cached in Paris and Berlin. Once home, he married his childhood sweetheart, the darkly sensual Bella Rosenfeld, Moscow-educated daughter of a wealthy merchant. It was the great love of his life, and he celebrated it in his exuberant 1918 Double Portrait with a Wineglass, in which a violet-stockinged Bella holds the artist up in the air, lifting him joyously above the streets, while an angel representing their daughter Ida hovers overhead.

In that same year, Chagall was made commissioner of fine arts in Vitebsk by the newly formed Soviet government, and as a commissar he rapidly demonstrated that he was a divine idiot. He called for “revolutionary painters” and peppered the local party press with commissarty exhortations. His vision of the revolution was to make “ordinary houses into museums and the average citizen into a creator.” Imagining that all the house painters of his native town were repressed artists, he spurred them on to decorating its drab buildings with folk imagery. When his superiors arrived from Moscow to find the walls covered with Chagallesque cows sailing through the sky instead of the standard portraits of Marx and Lenin, Chagall discovered belatedly that the Communists wanted art to be as pragmatic as a tractor. Everything rained on his parade; when he decked out the town with 50,000 ft. of patriotic red bunting, Izvestia wondered sarcastically how many much-needed suits of underwear could have been made of it.

The Last Ism. Soviet critics, too, were soon after Chagall’s hide, dubbing his misbegotten revolution in art a “mystic and formalistic bacchanal.” But the purge came from the quarter he least expected. He had hired two painters, Malevich and Lissitzky, members of the suprematist school of painting, to teach in Vitebsk’s Free Academy. One day he returned from Moscow to find that they had taken over the school, and based its new curriculum on their brand of geometrical abstraction and pure objectivity.

Thoroughly routed at home, he left for Moscow in 1920 to turn his attention to the theater, painting murals for Moscow’s Kamerny State Jewish Theater and designing sets and costumes for adaptations of Sholom Aleichem’s satirical tales. But his sets for Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, commingling geometry, Hebrew characters and dislocated figures in iconographic puzzles, were rejected as not naturalistic enough by the Moscow Art Theater. And so, having rejected all the isms of Paris, Chagall found himself rejected by Communism. In 1922, Chagall left Russia with $20, clad in khaki trousers provided by Hoover relief. Bella and his six-year-old daughter Ida followed. He never returned.

He stopped in Berlin long enough to discover that in place of 40 oils and 160 smaller works he had left with a dealer, there were one million worthless reichsmarks—at the same time that a single Chagall was being auctioned for a hundred times more. And, when he got to Paris, the canvases locked up in his La Ruche studio were gone. They had been sold into private hands, and his reputation had spread with them. He was famous at last—and dead broke.

Dead Souls & Fables. To Chagall’s astonishment, he also found himself heralded as one of the fathers of surrealism. Painters saw in his double-headed man in Paris Through the Window (1913), in his dream imagery and topsy-turvy juxtaposition of men and beasts the very quality they were striving for. Proclaimed Surrealism’s high priest, André Breton: “With Chagall alone, the metaphor made its triumphant return into modern painting.” In 1923, a surrealist delegation of Max Ernst, Paul Eluard and Gala (now Salvador Dali’s wife) actually knelt before Chagall, begging him to join their ranks. Another ism! He refused. “I want an art of the earth and not merely an art of the head,” he said, and isolated himself in the French landscape.

A curious Arcadian peace settled down over Chagall during his middle years. Ambroise Vollard, the famous Paris art dealer who had shepherded Cézanne, Bonnard and Gauguin, sensed the iconographer in the Russian expatriate and set him to the task of illustrating Gogol’s Dead Souls. Enthusiastically, Chagall mastered the new medium of etching. It gave him financial security and widened his popularity. The results, in their innocent whimsy, were an instant success, leading Dealer Vollard to commission the artist to illustrate the Fables of La Fontaine. That a Russian Jew should illustrate a French classic created a scandal in those days. But Vollard knew that the oriental origins of La Fontaine’s 17th century tales could best be pictured with Chagall’s folk-tinged, modern icons. He did a hundred gouaches in color for the book, but they were too subtle in hue to reproduce; so he redid them all as etchings in black and white.

Ask the Impossible. By far his most challenging adventure in graphics was Vollard’s commission to illustrate the Bible. To prepare, Chagall wanted to visit the Holy Land, but Vollard said, “Don’t bother! Why not goinstead to the Place Pigalle?” He went to Palestine anyway in 1931, just as he traveled to Holland in 1932 to study Rembrandt, to Spain in 1934 to study El Greco, to Poland in 1935 to examine Nazi-threatened Jewish traditions, and to Italy in 1937 to study the early Renaissance. By the time of Vollard’s death in 1939, Chagall had completed 66 plates for the Bible. In 1957, his Bible was published with 105 plates, honest, human, without halos, always proceeding from God’s word to the image. These ventures into the graphic arts alone would have ensured his eminence, for he had mastered etching and lithography like a master printer. No detail was too small. One artisan recalls that Chagall pointed out a minuscule mistake in the first strike of a lithograph, after three months reviewed the proof and immediately demanded to know why the error had not been corrected. Says he, “Chagall always asks the impossible.”

The Nazi onslaught caught Chagall in Vichy France, preoccupied with his work. He was loath to leave, even when the Emergency Rescue Committee urged him to come to the U.S. Recalls Varian Fry, the committee’s agent, “He wanted to know if there were any cows in America. I assured him that we had not only cows but goats too.” “And trees and green grass?” he asked. “We have all that,” said Fry. “I told him that New York City was only a part of the U.S. and even there was green grass. Chagall was enormously relieved.” Fry rescued him from a police roundup of Jews in Marseille, packed him, his family, and 3,500 Ibs. of his art works on board a transatlantic ship. The day before he arrived in New York City, June 23, 1941, the Nazis attacked Russia. The U.S. provided a wartime haven and a climate of liberty for Chagall. Manhattan, where he eventually found an apartment off Fifth Avenue, stunned him as “this Babylon.” The artist never managed to learn English, but he and his wife made their home a center for other expatriates.

Hemorrhaging Angel. In 1942, Choreographer Leonide Massine, a fellow Russian, got him to design costumes and sets for the New York Ballet Theater’s production of Aleko. Critic Emily Genauer recalls walking in on the two while they were trying to explore the project. Tchaikovsky’s trumpets blared over a record player, while Massine dragged Chagall around the room in an unbelievable pas de deux,. Yet somehow the collaboration worked. The premiere, which took place in Mexico in 1942, was a smash success.

Yet Chagall could not long escape into the world of theater and ballet. The disasters of war inflamed him, and in 1943 he painted the Yellow Crucifixion. Amidst acidic yellows and greens, Vitebsk burns, a ship sinks, a ladder is half-posed to remove Christ from the Cross. In his Falling Angel, begun in 1923 and not finished until 1947, the whole world violently disintegrates, with a rabbi fleeing with the Torah and an angel hemorrhaging down through a tempest-torn sky.

Guidon of Life. Chagall, too, was to suffer. In September 1944, Bella came down with a strep throat while summering in upstate New York. He rushed her to a hospital in the Adirondacks, where, hampered by his fragmentary English, they were turned away with the excuse that the hour was too late. The next day she died. It took him nine months to begin painting again; in the meantime, he helped his daughter translate Bella’s own memoirs of Russia, Burning Lights. Then, in 1945, he had recovered enough to begin work on the sets and costumes for Stravinsky’s The Firebird. The curtain for the ballet lofts a bare-breasted Bella in the embrace of a giant bird, her head upside down and holding a bouquet. It was probably his greatest theatrical production, disturbing, profound and an ultimate memorial from the bereaved painter.

He waited for three years after the war before returning to France. With him went a slender, married English girl, Virginia Haggard MacNeil, a theosophist and vegetarian. Chagall fell in love with her. After seven years, she ran off with an indigent photographer older than Chagall. It was an immense blow to his ego, but soon after, he met Valentine Brodsky, a Russian divorcee designing millinery in London, who became his second wife. “Vava,” as he calls her, is a forceful, intelligent woman, and the guidon of his life. He says she is “my procurer general,” for she has brought order into his life. When they disagree, Chagall cries, “Divorce!” Vava shrugs, “He divorces me many times a day.”

Campari & Cats. Vava only incurs her husband’s wrath when she tries to tidy his studio. After she straightens up, “I can’t find anything,” he says. “Vive disorder!” He works amidst a clutter of art books, racks of canvases, dozens of palettes laden with globs of dried paint, photographs of relatives and postcards of great paintings that dot the walls, and—of course—a samovar. There are dozens of classical records—Mozart, Bach, Stravinsky and Ravel—which the artist, who had first dreamed of growing up to be a violinist, plays while he paints. Large pen and ink sketches, prototypes for his Metropolitan Opera murals, are tacked up in the studio. On a nearby stool lie booklets on flowers and birds, also a picture pamphlet on a kindred effort that Chagall hopes to match in the Manhattan murals—Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

At his age he finds the 21 steps leading to his separate studio difficult, and he is now building another house in nearby Saint-Paul-de-Vence, despite his own misgivings. “At my age,” he confesses, “I’m absolutely mad to build this new house.” When completed at the end of the year, it will provide room for a ground-floor studio and his staff of three—cook, chauffeur and maid—who will share the tasks of providing the master with his occasional Campari and soda and chastening his roaming semi-Siamese and alley cats. For Chagall, work always comes first. Says Daughter Ida, now married to Franz Meyer, director of the Basel museum, “Sometimes I think the only thing I learned from Father is a terrible guilt feeling when I am not doing something. When I was a child there was always a timetable above my bed.” Adds Vava: “He gets furious at people loafing around. When our charwoman is busy scrubbing floors, Marc can go to work too.”

Time ticks in the Chagall household as relentlessly as the swinging clocks in his own paintings, and yet what drives him onward is no longer any anxiety about his place in the history of art. By the judgment of his peers, that place is secure. Picasso has judged him from afar favorably. “When Matisse dies,” he once told Francoise Gilot, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” Georges Braque knew Chagall only toward the end of his life, but he was impressed: “Now that I know the man, I see that he is a guarantor of painting. I like it.” Said Joan Miró in Spain recently, “Marc Chagall is an authentic colorist, a painter who seeks to express his soul through the polychromy of his palette. He has exerted a greater influence on the succeeding generation than upon his contemporaries.”

True, some of the very qualities that speak directly to Chagall’s admirers have proven stumbling blocks to critics, such as Yale Art Historian George Heard Hamilton, who feels his art is “high-class kitsch,” because it is too “pretty.” It is a view opposed by the Museum of Modern Art’s Peter Selz: “Chagall is one of the truly popular artists of the century. He has combined the formal exploration of the cubists with his own personal, whimsical fantasy.”

Rosettes & Symbols. Chagall is a Jew, though not a particularly devout one. And though he detests the classification of Jewish artist, still he has never tried to escape from his origins and cannot banish them from his mind. Unquestionably, the tradition of the Hasidic sect, which seeks to blend the soul with God through trancelike levitation of the heart, helped to prepare the painter for a mysticism that rarely finds expression in Western art. The flavor of Sholom Aleichem’s shtetl still colors Chagall’s dealings with the world.

Observes Paris’ Musée National d’Art Moderne Curator Jean Cassou: “Chagall is one of his own images. He is the manager of his own fairyland.” His modesty is positively immodest. When people call him maître, he will reply: “No, centimètre.” When Notre Dame awarded him an honorary doctorate of fine arts (his third) this spring, Chagall commented wryly: “I am three times a doctor, arid I know nothing.” After receiving the red rosette of the commander in the Légion d’Honneur, he shrugged it off with “Isn’t it terrible that De Gaulle and Malraux make me work for the state?”

Yet Chagall profoundly doubts that his fantasy world and the psychic realities underlying it are exclusively Jewish. Critic Harold Rosenberg agrees, saying: “Chagall is using Jews the same way that the surrealists used clowns—as interesting, exotic objects.” Says Jean Cassou: “If Chagall had been a Norman peasant, he would have had the same dreams with Norman memories.” And Britain’s Sir Herbert Read comments:

“There are experimentalists, like Picasso, and those who, like Braque, discover their personal equation and go on repeating it. Chagall belongs to the second category. What is important is that an artist find a symbolic mode of expression. Chagall made this discovery.”

End As a Bouquet. Indeed, for him there is no world more real than that composed of the weightless symbols that he has made uniquely his own. Populated by creatures and objects, whether cows, fiddles, the Torah or floating lovers, it draws on the remembrances of his youth and yet, through his artistry, belongs to others. For him, unlocking this world is no less than an act of love.

And in the mystery of making nature airborne, he may well be trying to pull heaven down to earth.

“If someone sees in my art only a pleasure-seeking art,” Chagall says, “he is entitled to his opinion. He is also free to consider another reality unwillingly transformed in a symbol, the illogical and psychic construction of forms and colors. I was not born simply to seek pleasure; I wanted, without any isms, to find a psychic form.” Flowers fill Chagall’s home, competing with his paintings everywhere. The moment they begin to fade, the artist prods his wife to throw them out.

When Chagall says, “The end of life is a bouquet,” he proclaims it not as a fatuous lover of beauty or a pretty arranger in oils, but as a man who understands the essential despair of nature. Once fully grown, flowers are snipped off at their prime, gathered by man to give in a gesture of love. But the very act of making the bouquet ensures their ultimate decay and death. So mingled, life and death are one in nature. Chagall, since he cannot make a flower, continues nature into art and paints the perishable produce of his love.