In Chagall's World Love is Like Green Passion

In Chagall's World Love is Like Green Passion

Conventionally associated with the most intact and authentic natural world, and the visual symbol par excellence of everything that aspires to be pure, organic and contrary to any logic or industrial exploitation, the color Green has never found a better celebration - indeed - a more iconic and persuasive application, as in the spectacular 1917 canvas by Marc Chagall,

The Walk where it acts as an ideal backdrop, and ideal architectural backdrop, to one of the most visionary and poetic representations of perfect Love.

Created to give body to one of the Author's most recurring fantasies, and a lyrical image of the dynamic and compelling power of passion, the canvas features the painter who, in an elegant dandy suit, seems to hold his beloved companion Bella Rosenfeld while the latter soars in the clear sky of a spring morning, unanchored from the earthly world in a sort of joyful ascension that only true love, lightening and freeing the heart, can propitiate.

Against the almost cubist and enthusiastically green backdrop of the countryside of her native town of Vitebsk, in Belarus, during a break in a picnic for two, as the colorful tablecloth in shades of red seems to suggest, next to a bottle and a glass of wine, Bella – now unanchored from the ground – tenderly looks at the painter who holds her firmly with his left hand, while with his right he holds a small bird, as if to signify that that surreal flight, traditional prerogative of the winged creature, now rightfully belongs to those who have now conquered, through the gift of passion, a magnificent incorporeality.

The landscape watches the flight with serene indifference, and the horse in the background grazes without suspicion on the top of a distant hill, while only the airy and softly pink mass of a distant synagogue seems to watch over the two lovers, standing out against the bright surrounding green. But it is the protagonist's widespread and almost mad smile that strikes the spectator and subjugates him: an unstoppable and triumphant smile that decrees - with immediate peremptoriness - the subversive and irrational power of passion that joyfully overturns the immutable categories of the human and the conventional.