Painting: Midsummer Night's Dreamer

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End As a Bouquet. Indeed, for him there is no world more real than that composed of the weightless symbols that he has made uniquely his own. Populated by creatures and objects, whether cows, fiddles, the Torah or floating lovers, it draws on the remembrances of his youth and yet, through his artistry, belongs to others. For him, unlocking this world is no less than an act of love.

And in the mystery of making nature airborne, he may well be trying to pull heaven down to earth.

"If someone sees in my art only a pleasure-seeking art," Chagall says, "he is entitled to his opinion. He is also free to consider another reality unwillingly transformed in a symbol, the illogical and psychic construction of forms and colors. I was not born simply to seek pleasure; I wanted, without any isms, to find a psychic form." Flowers fill Chagall's home, competing with his paintings everywhere. The moment they begin to fade, the artist prods his wife to throw them out.

When Chagall says, "The end of life is a bouquet," he proclaims it not as a fatuous lover of beauty or a pretty arranger in oils, but as a man who understands the essential despair of nature. Once fully grown, flowers are snipped off at their prime, gathered by man to give in a gesture of love. But the very act of making the bouquet ensures their ultimate decay and death. So mingled, life and death are one in nature. Chagall, since he cannot make a flower, continues nature into art and paints the perishable produce of his love.