Mark Chagall - art, symbolism and quotes

Just before my daughter went back to college for her 3rd year she came across this artist and sent me an e-mail of some of his work. I just now looked him up on the Internet and wanted to share some of his fabulous work with all of you

Art

Use of symbolism:

• Cow: life par excellence: milk, meat, leather, horn, power.
• Tree: another life symbol.
• Cock (rooster): fertility, often painted together with lovers.
• Bosom (often naked): eroticism and fertility of life (Chagall loved and respected women).
• Fiddler: in Chagall’s town Vitebsk the fiddler made music at crosspoints of life (birth, wedding, death).
• Herring (often also painted as a flying fish): commemorates Chagall’s father working in a fish factory.
• Pendulum Clock: time, and modest life (in the time of prosecution at the Loire River the pendulum seems being driven with force into the wooden box of the pendulum clock).
• Candlestick: two candles symbolize the Shabbat or the Menorah (candlestick with seven candles) or the Hanukkah-candlestick, and therefore the life of pious Jews (Chassidim).
• Windows: Chagall’s Love of Freedom, and Paris through the window.
• Houses of Vitebsk (often in paintings of his time in Paris): feelings for his homeland.
• Scenes of the Circus: Harmony of Man and Animal, which induces Creativity in Man.
• Crucifixion of Jesus: an unusual subject for a Jewish painter, and likely a response to the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany in the late 1930s.[2]
• Horses: Freedom.
• The Eiffel Tower: Up in the sky, freedom.

Quotations:

• “All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites.”
• “Great art picks up where nature ends.”
• “I work in whatever medium likes me at the moment.”
• “Only love interests me, and I am only in contact with things I love.”
• “My name is Marc, my emotional life is sensitive and my purse is empty, but they say I have talent.”

-Symbolism and Quotations from wikipedia.org