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T.F. Chen Cultural Center Post-Van Gogh Retrospective: Singing Above Saint-Remy
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Gogh: "Wheat Field and Cypress,"(1889), National Gallery, London Chagall: "The Sources of Music,"(1967), Drawings for the paintings at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York "The Triumph of the Music,"(1967), Drawings for the painting at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York "The Triump of the Music,"(1967), Drawings for the painting at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York "The Concert,"(1957), Galerie Maeght, Paris |
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| Previous Art Work 20 of 53 Next About the center About the artist |
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| Combining
Vincent Van Gogh's "Wheat Field and Cypress" (1889) of his St. Remy period and
musical fairies from Marc Chagall's universe. T/F/ Chen has duplicated a "Wedding
Above Village" in an entirely different light. Van Gogh's cypresses, olive trees and mountains still remain, yet bright sunshine beams upon them instead of a crescent moon and stars. A ripe wheat field extends on the foreground of the landscape while the original blue-green sky with moving clouds has been replaced by an ocean of radiant light, with fairy angels playing instruments and dancing about. The music seems echoed by the dynamic landscape as well as by a large disc hovering in resonance. The entire painting breathes with a mystical correspondence of color, form, and movement. Chagall's marvelous artwork with its highly original imagery explores a world of delightful, mystical fantasy. His works celebrate life in a radiant spirituality. "I am a child who is going on," Chagall said in his old age. Indeed, Chagalll was an eternal child with an inexhaustible imagination. In his universe, we see red donkeys flying though the air, cocks carrying girls off on their backs, wedding couples with bouquets like comets, swirling around in the night sky, and fiddlers playing their fiddles on rooftops. "When I paint the wings of an angel," Chagall remarked, "these wings are also flames, just as they are also thoughts and desires." Besides animals (such as goats, bulls, fish, and cocks); Chagall also brought in the world of entertainment, the circus, and views of his hometown Vitelsk and Paris with the Eiffel Tower as his subjects. Moreover, the artist himself and his wife (Bella first, then Vava), his father at prayer, his grandfather, the butcher, the rabbi carrying the Torah, and characters from the Bible, especially Christ and the Crucifixion scene- all of these figures walked onto his stage of marvelous orchestration. As a poet and storyteller in plastic expression, Marc Chagall commemorates our sense of the miraculous and mysterious in life, while embracing the exuberance of nature in Love as this painting of Chen's, "Singing Above St. Remy," may wit
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