This beautiful painting is entirely typical of Marc Chagall, with its use of bright flowers and also two embraced lovers. A bird-like creature can also be seen to the bottom right, amidst a background which is based on the artist's hometown of Vitebsk. The principles of perspective are thrown out as the artist expresses himself to the full, wishing more to focus on producing a dream-like atmosphere which resembled reality rather than copying it directly. The flowers themselves appear to be either on a window sill or a table, but it is hard to tell because of how Chagall bends his perspectives in a similar way to how the famous Cubists of the early 20th century would put together their still life paintings. We see an open window as the male figure embraces his lover who flies into his arms from above the panaroma of the town below.
Bouquet aux Amoureux Volants, to use its original French title, was initially begun in the early 1930s, although we are not sure exactly when. He would produce the piece whilst living in Paris at the time, even though it is not this city that is pictured within the scene. It would be the loss of his wife, Bella, which persuaded him many years later to then actually finish off the piece, and so there is a huge romantic background to this particular artwork. We do know that when starting Bouquet with Flying Lovers, Chagall was working on a number of still life artworks, many of which were of flowers in vases, no doubt inspired by the work of numerous Cubist painters. It may even have been that the figures at the top of the composition were actually added afterwards, but we cannot be sure either way on that, with no records available around how the work progressed over the years.
The painting remains one of a number of artworks owned by the Tate in the UK who host a number of different galleries right across the country, all of which are open to the public for free. They also have paid-for exhibitions which tend to focus on the oeuvre of specific artists and tend to concentrate on European artists in most cases. Chagall himself enjoys a strong following right around the world, though particularly so in the US and across Europe. Many of his artworks have been snapped up by private collectors, but such was the huge output from his career that sufficient numbers have made their way into public galleries and so plenty of his career is still easy enough for the majority of us to see first hand.
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