Bella in Green 1934-35

Marc Chagall (1887-1985)

“Her silence is mine, her eyes mine. It is as if she knows everything about my childhood, my present, my future, as if she can see right through me.”

Chagall’s feelings for his beloved wife resonate with anybody who has ever truly been in love. He openly adored his wife and she adored him right back. Bella was Chagall’s muse, the vision behind his seminal paintings of characters floating around in a blissful state.

From the moment they fell for each other in 1909, Marc Chagall and his wife, Bella, seemed to share a particular way of seeing the world. Bella was a talented writer and her description of their first encounter is like a Chagall painting in words: “When you did catch a glimpse of his eyes, they were as blue as if they’d fallen straight out of the sky. They were strange eyes … long, almond-shaped … and each seemed to sail along by itself, like a little boat.”

Famously, he often depicted himself and Bella flying together, as if their shared joy had such physical force it countermanded the law of gravity itself.

The Chagalls’ story is also remarkable because they experienced so much 20th-century history first-hand. In 1911, leaving Bella in Russia, Marc made it to Paris, then the centre of the modernist movement happening in western art. He soon added something revolutionary. “Under his influence, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” André Breton, who credited Chagall as the father of surrealism, later said.

Marc returned to Vitebsk in 1914 to marry Bella, and they were trapped in Russia by the outbreak of the first world war. They moved to St Petersburg, and found themselves ringside spectators to the Russian revolutions. Then, for a brief, heady moment, the avant garde became the new establishment in Russian art and Marc was invited to be commissar of visual arts. Bella sensibly advised him to say no, but he accepted the offer to start a new art school in Vitebsk. Official opinion, however, quickly hardened about what was proper proletarian art, and Marc was forced to resign from the school. Apart from a brief, joyful stint designing sets for the Moscow Yiddish theatre, he now found his work unwelcome in Russia.

He, Bella and their five year-old daughter, Ida, left Russia in 1922, never to return. They watched in horror from afar through the 1920s and 30s as the Jewish homeland of their youth was systematically destroyed first by the Communists then by the Nazis. Bella had long neglected her writing to support Marc in his painting, but during the last few years of her life in exile in New York she was moved to write a lyrical memoir in Yiddish, Burning Lights, about her childhood in Vitebsk. In 1944 she died of a throat infection that would now easily be cured with antibiotics.

The Flying Lovers: Bella and Marc Chagall | DailyArt Magazine

“Felt like fleeing back to Russia, as he daydreamed while he painted, about the riches of Russian folklore, his Hasidic experiences, his family, and especially Bella.” - Marc Chagall, My Life.

Marc Chagall, Wedding, 1918, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia.

Bella and Marc Chagall. Neomania Magazine (detail)

no-one knows it, not even you, but when i am alone in my quiet hours... then do i lead my fingertips... over my lips, and take from them your name, like a prayer...