An Undying Love: “Around Her” by Marc Chagall

“Around Her” by Marc Chagall, 1945.
(credit: Centre Pompidou)

Bella Rosenfeld met Marc Chagall in the summer of 1909 on a visit to St. Petersburg. Marc was an aspiring artist, in the throes of creating his now famous oeuvre. Bella, the daughter of a successful jeweler, was in the midst of her studies and acquiring a taste for writing. Their meeting was the beginning of an artist-muse relationship that would inspire some of Chagall’s best work, including 1945’s “Around Her.” The painting is one of the most moving homages to his love for her, as well an expression of grief over untimely death.

“I was surprised at his eyes, they were so blue as the sky. [They] were unusual, not such as somebody’s else… What is he thinking about? He is moving to me nearer. I’m lowering my eyes. Nobody is saying anything. We both feel our hearts beating. The face of this boy lives inside me as my second ego, his voice is in my ears. I met artists before but nobody such as he.”

–Bella Rosenfeld on meeting Marc Chagall

Bella and Chagall.
(credit: tanais.info)

The couple married on July 25th, 1915. For almost 30 years, they were an inseparable duo – it said that Chagall would never “sign off” on a painting’s completion without her input. So when Bella died in 1945 from a viral infection, it was as if the author’s world came to a halt. He stopped painting entirely for nine months.

His mourning ultimately found expression in his craft, with paintings like “Around Her” immortalizing their love in his tender brushstrokes. The right side of the painting depicts a distressed Bella with a couple representing a traditional Jewish marriage ceremony hovering over her. Chagall paints himself to the left – grief-stricken and blue, the color that sets the melancholic mood for the painting – his head inversed. Vitebsk, the city where their marriage took place, is depicted in the center.

The work is not only an exercise in grieving but a telling portrait of death’s complicated repercussions: we see Chagall’s love and unwavering admiration for Bella, who is depicted beautifully, donning a vibrant dress. We see his need to hold onto their past, as well as the sadness it brings him to remember it.

A page from Chagall’s sketchbook, depicting his grief.
(credit: Telegraph.co.uk)

In 2011, a collection surfaced of previously unseen works by Chagall from an 85-page journal. You could say they were a collaboration between himself and Bella, as they were entirely inspired by her own journal, which the artist said he drew from for over 20 years. Telegraph UK’s art correspondent Roya Nikkhah describes the works as a portrait of “an enduring love affair.” “In perhaps the most moving image,” she says, “Chagall, with a blue face and melancholy expression, is seated at his easel, contemplating a red painting of himself and Bella,” the woman who was so integral to his life, his work – his joy, “one hand reach[es] out to touch the canvas… his other hand [is] held to his heart.”

Read more of SevenPonds’s Soulful Expressions here.