Bella

George Costakis, as no one else, understood the complexity and contradictions of characters of some of the great artists. One of the cases when Costakis faced such a contradiction was with Marc Chagall. The stumbling block was a double-sided canvas with a portrait of Bella (Chagall's wife) on one side, and a street scene on the other.

When the owners of this work offered it to Costakis, the collector had doubts about the authorship of the painting (could one of Chagall's followers have painted it?). Meanwhile, Marc Chagall himself, at a personal meeting with Costakis in Paris, confirmed the authenticity of the canvas and advised him to buy it. Once the painting ended up in Costakis collection, it went to Chagall's large-scale exhibition in Hamburg in 1959. But there it was rejected by one of the curators (the curator being Chagall’s son in law) as an “unconfirmed". Several times after that Marc Chagall admitted this work to be his, then again refused the authorship. For George Costakis, this story was very painful - he preferred to trust the artists. In the end, the collector gave the "unconfirmed Chagall" to his daughter Aliki. She, in turn, gave the painting a new life: she offered it for an exhibition dedicated to the 100th anniversary of George Costakis at the Tretyakov Gallery in 2014 where it underwent a detailed examination: the work’s analysis confirmed the date of its creation, the authorship still remains unconfirmed.