- Person
- Marc Chagall
- Lived
- 1887–1985
- Field
- Painting
- From
- Russian-French
The story
Marc Chagall had been fascinated by the Bible since his childhood in a Jewish family near Vitebsk. In the 1930s he worked for years on etchings illustrating it, and over the following decades he painted a great cycle of large canvases on biblical themes, which he called the Biblical Message.
In 1966, at the age of about 80, Chagall gave a large group of these works to the French state, supported by the culture minister André Malraux, on condition that a museum be built for them in Nice, near his home on the Côte d'Azur. In 1967 the Louvre in Paris exhibited 17 large paintings and 38 gouaches under the title Message Biblique. It was a remarkable gift from an artist who had arrived in France as a poor immigrant and later had to flee it as a refugee. He made a second donation in 1972.
The city of Nice offered a large plot of land in the Cimiez district, and the architect André Hermant, who had worked with Auguste Perret and Le Corbusier, designed a low, restrained building so that the paintings would stand out. Chagall followed the construction closely, and the landscape architect Henri Fisch planted a Mediterranean garden in the cool colours he requested. Chagall also made stained-glass windows for the auditorium with Charles Marq and a mosaic for the building.
The Musée National Message Biblique Marc Chagall was inaugurated on 7 July 1973, Chagall's birthday. Twelve paintings illustrating Genesis and Exodus hang in the main rooms, and five on the Song of Songs in a smaller hexagonal room. At its opening, Chagall said that his painting represented not the dream of one people but of all humanity.
The museum, renamed the Musée national Marc Chagall in 2008, has grown through gifts from his heirs after his death in 1985 and through further acquisitions. It presents Chagall's vision of the Hebrew Bible as a message for people of every faith, and it has hosted major exhibitions of his work, including a 2003 retrospective organised with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Why it matters
Chagall's gift gave the public a permanent home for his biblical art, shared as a message for all humanity.
About Marc Chagall
One of the 20th century's most beloved painters; pioneer of modernism rooted in Jewish folk life.
More about Marc Chagall
- Chagall's America Windows celebrate religious freedomMarc Chagall created the America Windows for the Art Institute of Chicago as a tribute to the US Bicentennial and America's commitment to cultural and religious freedom.
- Marc Chagall designed a cathedral window at the age of 90Marc Chagall designed a stained-glass window for Chichester Cathedral at the age of 90, inspired by Psalm 150, and it was unveiled by the Duchess of Kent in 1978.
- Marc Chagall's twelve windows for a Jerusalem hospitalMarc Chagall spent two years creating twelve stained-glass windows of the tribes of Israel for the synagogue of Jerusalem's Hadassah Medical Center, installed in February 1962.
- Marc Chagall painted the ceiling of the Paris OperaOn 23 September 1964 Marc Chagall's new ceiling for the Paris Opera was unveiled: nearly 2,400 square feet of canvas paying tribute to great composers, dancers and actors.
- Marc Chagall filled every window of a Kent village churchAll Saints Church in Tudeley, Kent, is the only church in the world with all twelve of its windows by Marc Chagall, installed between 1967 and 1985.
- Marc Chagall founded an art school in his home townIn 1918, as commissar of arts for Vitebsk, Marc Chagall founded the city's People's Art College and an art museum, opening art education to ordinary people.
- Marc Chagall made the Peace window at the United NationsIn 1964 Marc Chagall created Peace, a stained-glass window at the United Nations in New York honouring Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who died on a peace mission in 1961.
- Chagall's Mainz windows became a sign of reconciliationFrom 1978, aged 91, Marc Chagall created windows for St Stephan's church in Mainz as a sign of Jewish-Christian friendship, in a city once called the capital of European Jewry.
- Marc Chagall painted murals for Moscow's Jewish theatreFor the 1921 opening of Moscow's State Jewish Chamber Theatre, Marc Chagall painted huge murals of dancers, fiddlers and acrobats that became a landmark in theatre history.
- Marc Chagall preserved a vanished Jewish world in paintMarc Chagall's paintings of Vitebsk, its fiddlers, rabbis and wooden houses, became the most important visual record of East European Jewish life, and inspired Fiddler on the Roof.
Sources
- Marc Chagall Wikipedia
- Nice - Musée national Marc Chagall French Ministry of Culture
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.