CHAGALL - Liebe ist ein ewiger Traum

Vitebsk, 1887. A village in the Russian Empire, a Hasidic family, a narrow world. And Marc Chagall, a child who would later paint the world as if it were flying.

Chagall never accepted a realism that omitted the soul. His paintings are not dreams – they are more precise than reality because they show how things feel, not how they look. Lovers float above rooftops because being in love is like that. Violins play themselves because music does that.

In 1906, Chagall left Vitebsk for St. Petersburg – with nothing but the will to paint. Four years later, Paris, La Ruche in Montparnasse, Modigliani and Léger as neighbors, the entire European avant-garde around him. He absorbed everything and let nothing overwhelm him. Because the world he came from had come with him – Vitebsk, the small Hasidic village in the Russian Empire that he had left and never gotten rid of. The wooden houses, the Orthodox churches, the streets of his childhood appeared in his Parisian paintings as if he had carried them in his luggage. "I and the Village," painted in Paris in 1911, shows a village scene that is unmistakably Vitebsk. The floating figures above the rooftops – they are the rooftops of Vitebsk, not Paris. He saw Paris through the eyes of his origin and painted his origin with the means of modernism. Both simultaneously, inextricably, and in that, completely himself.

Love was his true theme – and he meant it without irony. Bella, his first wife, floats through decades of his work. No other painter of the 20th century so stubbornly defended tenderness as a pictorial theme.

What if?

Chagall painted lovers – man and woman, floating, dissolving into each other. Whether he would have ever painted two men like that, we don't know. The art history of his time, the art market, society – they all would have prevented it.

We let young handsome twinks float over Paris, lovers – just like with Chagall. Gay lovers. That is KUNSTWERK BILDER.

"In our life there is only one color – the color of love."
— Marc Chagall

Gay Art. Gay art for your home. KUNSTWERK BILDER.