If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.
For Marc Chagall, art and love were inextricably linked, and the present work offers a tender contemplation of these deeply entwined passions.
Bella Rosenfeld was the great love of Chagall’s life. Upon first encounter in their shared hometown of Vitebsk, Chagall felt a profound connection to Bella, writing "Her silence is mine. Her eyes, mine. I feel she has known me always, my childhood, my present life, my future; as if she were watching over me, divining my innermost being, though this is the first time I have seen her. I know this is she, my wife. Her pale colouring, her eyes. How big and round and black they are! They are my eyes, my soul." (quoted in J. Baal-Teshuva, (ed.), Chagall, A Retrospective, New York, 1995, pp. 58-59)
In several of Chagall’s earliest depictions of Bella, he expressed their connection as an embrace—bodies so closely intertwined, they appear as one (see fig. 2). In Le peintre au double-profil, Chagall takes this concept of oneness a step further, depicting himself and Bella as two halves of the same person. The veiled bride mirrors the profile of the pensive artist, suggesting that she is not just his muse but a part of his very being.
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The double profile recalls depictions of the Roman god Janus, who represents the liminal space between concrete and abstract dualities such as life and death. After Bella’s unexpected death in 1944, she lived on in the artist’s mind and on his canvases. Bella’s symbolic presence in Chagall’s late work is all the more powerful for her corporal absence in his daily life.
In Le peintre au double-profil, vibrant red flowers—equal in scale to the central figure—further emphasize the nostalgia and melancholy of the subject. Flowers had a special emotional significance for Chagall.
Marc Chagall loved flowers. He delighted in their aroma, in contemplating their colors. For a long time, certainly after 1948 when he moved for good to the South of France after his wartime stay in the U.S., there were always flowers in his studio. In his work bouquets of flowers held a special place […]. Usually they created a sense of joy, but they could also reflect the melancholy of memories.
In this painting, Chagall delicately combines many of the motifs that populated his art over the decades to create a moving meditation on the nature of life and art. As the artist once declared: "In life, just as on the artist's palette, there is but one single colour that gives meaning to life and art - the colour of love" (Jacob Baal-Teshuva, Chagall, Cologne, 1998, p. 10).