"All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites"
About this Quote
The subtext is emotional, not technical. Chagall isn’t teaching color theory so much as smuggling in a worldview: intimacy thrives on both comfort and tension. Neighbors give you belonging; opposites give you electricity. That duality maps cleanly onto his work, where folk memories, religious imagery, and dream logic collide in saturated blues, reds, and greens that shouldn’t “behave” but do. His palette often stages reunion and rupture at once, especially for an artist shaped by displacement, revolution, and exile.
Context matters: Chagall’s modernism was never the cold, analytical kind. While other avant-gardes chased reduction, he doubled down on lyricism and the irrational. This sentence defends that choice. It claims that meaning in art isn’t only in subjects (lovers, villages, angels) but in the relationships between hues - the way painting can make contradiction feel like home.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Chagall, Marc. (2026, January 15). All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/all-colors-are-the-friends-of-their-neighbors-and-87359/
Chicago Style
Chagall, Marc. "All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/all-colors-are-the-friends-of-their-neighbors-and-87359/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"All colors are the friends of their neighbors and the lovers of their opposites." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/all-colors-are-the-friends-of-their-neighbors-and-87359/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.






