Remembering Marc Chagall

Among the greatest lovers of our shared humanity, of beauty, and of the great joy that shines through—even through human suffering, there is the consummately humane Marc Chagall. On this day, July 7, in 1887 he was born in Vitebsk, Belarus. We could all use a little Chagall. Better yet, we would all benefit from the joyful vision he left us.

Take just one telling example of how he drew us into his paintings in order to experience what he experienced, to see what he saw. A few years after Bella forged with him a beautiful marriage that lasted until her death in the 1940s, the elated young painter captured his joy in this delightful work, The Promenade, 1918:

Never was a man more joyful when loved by a woman than the man portrayed in this painting. On the promenade he stands, but their love transcends and defines both the space he finds himself in and the space of the painting itself that we encounter, since the arrangement of the two subjects directs our eyes from lower left, where the picnic basket has erupted into an abundance of color, up to the beaming Chagall, then further on to the upper right where the beloved Bella flies above, one hand in Marc's, the other hidden in the heavens still higher above. Either perspective, his within the scene, or ours moving from the lower left to upper right, is crowned wimsically.

Over the next seven decades Chagall would regularly depict lovers zooming across the skies above a variety of land- and cityscapes. Up there, we might encounter a flying horse or a flutist perched on a treetop, each bathed in the light shining from a ball of warm sunfire nestled in blue skies. At the heart of the matter, Marc Chagall's experience is joy. Ours will be too if we allow Bella's beloved to draw us into his imaginative world.

Andrew J. Zwerneman is c0-founder and president of Cana Academy.