Song of Songs IV

Marc Chagall was born 129 years ago today. He was a Russian-French artist associated with several major artistic styles and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries, and fine art prints. 

He had two basic reputations, writes art historian Michael J. Lewis: as a pioneer of modernism and as a major Jewish artist. He experienced modernism's "golden age" in Paris, where he synthesized the art forms of Cubism, Symbolism, and Fauvism, with the influence of Fauvism giving way to Surrealism. Yet throughout these phases of his style he remained most emphatically a Jewish artist, whose work was one long dreamy reverie of life in his native village of Vitebsk. "When Matisse dies," Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, "Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is." 

Chagall painted this in 1958 as part of a series of illustrations of the Old Testament. It is titled Song of Songs IV, after the fourth chapter in the Bible's book of the same name. The book is a series of highly symbolic songs about a bride and her groom. The first verse of that chapter reads, in part, “Your hair is like a flock of goats descending from the hills of Gilead.” (That was a compliment, in case you couldn’t tell.) Nowhere does the biblical text mention flying horses or blue-faced harpists or upside-down birds, though — that is all Chagall. He does not attempt to depict the metaphors described in the song, but instead captures the spirit of the verses. Poetry radiates from the floating fantastic figures, warm unnatural colors, and impossible celestial arrangement.