Marc created this painting after his wife Bella's demise. It is charged with imagery, in the epilogue of the publication of Bella's journal. In Chagall's words, "In the nightfall of September 2, 1944, the thunder growled and the deluge hit at 6 o'clock, when Bella took her last breath. My world went dark." Marc Chagall's grieve is epitomized in the painting five years after her death. He embodies the clock as a holder for his reminiscence, portraying the eternal picture of an embracing duo, seemingly Bella and Chagall, on the pendulum's left side and a blue wing on the right side. The clock in Yiddish fiction is a mark of suffering.
A rooster dons the sky's top-left while the solemn night indicating demise gives a sad pictogram and adds dramatic tonality to the painting. The flowers on the bottom right corner of the piece allude to Marc's use of flowers in preceding paintings of him and Bella (The Birthday, 1915). Mark's time with Bella on earth might have been cut short, but the bond formed between them when they fell in love can never end no matter how many years later.
Surrealism was an artistic faction that developed in Europe as a result of World War I. The movement was hugely influenced by dada. The faction is best known for its ocular writings and artworks and the combination of outlying realities to activate the cataleptic brain through the images. Artists like Marc Chagall painted scary, irrational scenes with photographic exactitude, creating bizarre creatures from daily items and building up painting methods that allowed the insentient to convey itself. According to the movement's leader, Andre' Breton, it planned to resolve the earlier ambiguous stipulations of vision and actuality to an absolute reality or surreality.
Surrealism's works feature the aspect of surprise, non sequitur, and unpredicted concurrences. Nonetheless, many surrealist artists consider their work as an idiom of the theoretical movement primary, with the works themselves being an artifact. Breton's organizer was overt in his affirmation that surrealism was, most importantly, innovatory progress. The surrealism movement was created officially on October 15, 1924, when its leader Andre' Breton made public the surrealist manifesto in Paris. The movement extended internationally from its official launching, impacting the visual arts, literature, politics, social theories, and philosophy.