During this immersive exhibition (Atelier des Lumieres open until 7 January 2024) all the themes that make up Chagall's imagination will inhabit the Atelier des Lumières, like intertwined clippings. They will be punctuated by excerpts from classical, klezmer or jazz music, which are also an integral part of his cultural universe. His fantastic bestiary, as well as the wonderful circus characters, of the fairy tales or opera, but also biblical episodes and references to Russian culture, poetically translate the rich personal experience of the artist, which resonates quite naturally in that of his people and his generation. Witness of the great historical events of the twentieth century, from the darkest to the most radiant, Chagall thus made his bold and imaginative art his first instrument of commitment, peace and hope.
Prolific and unclassifiable painter, Marc Chagall (1887-1985) in a digital show presents all of his creation, revealing a work rooted in its time, at the crossroads between the Italian and cultural innovations of its century and in constant renewal.
Paris and New Yorkk, emblematic capitals of modern art, represent two crucial stages in the artist's long journey. Paris was his chosen city, offering, thanks to the avant-gardes of the XNUMXs, fertile ground for experimental research to the young painter of Russian origin, who fed them with his own cultural references. New York was first and foremost a place of exile in the troubled XNUMXs, which nevertheless gave new impetus to the artist's creativity. After the war, several exhibitions and important art commissions will still create links between Paris and New York and will remind Chagall in the United States, until the 70s. While seeking his own stylistic path and without being able to confine himself to a school or movement among those with which he confronted and observed, Chagall was able to nourish his work with the most diversified and up-to-date experiences, in each of the cities and continents in which he lived. Thus, while in Paris he confronted the Cubist and Fauve movements, experimented with a new light and developed his rich and intense palette, in Vitebsk he joined the authorities of the Russian avant-garde, fighting in particular for the renewal of the art of the scene and furniture urban. But it is in New York that the experience of New World space and architecture advantageously enriches this groundbreaking exploration. Extending far beyond painting, it now embraces the stage and costumes of ballet, sculpture, ceramics, stained glass, mosaic, collage… in a multidisciplinary thing and a monumental resolution, which also brings the Visitor, immersed in this creation digital.
Paris, capital of modernity
In this first chapter we find ourselves immediately in Paris, the artist's city of choice, where he arrived in 1911, at the age of 24. Like many Russian artists, and of many other nationalities, the young painter combines this teeming capital of artistic encounters and experiments with a charm that is reflected in the many views of the city that he paints, with intense and bright colors. Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism and the other avant-gardes of the turn of the century rapidly fueled his way of conceiving the portraits and figures of this period. Installed in a studio in La Ruche, Chagall not only frequented painters (Picasso, Delaunay, Gris, Soutine…) and sculptors (Laurens, Zadkine, Lipchitz…), but also poets such as Cendrars and Apollinaire e directors like Diaghileff. Thus, without however adhering to any of the artistic movements, he participates in this vast multidisciplinary laboratory which is the Montparnasse of the XNUMXs, welcoming in his paintings all the suggestions to which he is receptive, but which he translates into his universe and his style which is already got very personal.
Between tradition and avant-garde in Vitebsk
Marc Chagall, La Maison Bleue, 1920, oil on toile, 66 x 97 cm, musée des Beaux-Arts de la ville de Liège, Belgium, Photo: akg images, © Adagp, Paris 2023
Left for a short stay at Vitebsk, his hometown, Chagall was detained in Russia following the declaration of war in 1914. Historical events heightened the need to bear witness to him on a daily basis and to document as faithfully as possible the suffering suffered by all citizens. Thus, his country unfolds new visions, in resonance with the urgency of reviving the energy of vanishing places and traditions in his work. It is through the prism of his Parisian experience that Chagall revisits the Russian pictorial tradition, popular art and "neo-primitivism", representing his relatives, the inhabitants of his village and the places of his childhood. Always open to the most current demands, he shares some concerns and projects of the Russian avant-garde, such as the recognition of the status of the artist, collaborative art and urban decoration projects. When constructivism claims a utilitarian art in the service of the community, Chagall turns especially to the art of the scene. His collaboration with the Jewish Theater in Moscow, starting in 1919, marks his first experience of architectural art, followed by the creation of seven murals, the curtain and the ceiling of the Kamerny Theater in Moscow.
Fairy tales and the circus
Marc Chagall, Cirque Vollard : L'Acrobate à cheval, vers 1927- 1928, gouache et encre sur papier coloré noir, 62, 9 x 47, 6 cm, collection privée, Photo © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris, © Adagp, Paris, 2023
After his definitive return to Paris in 1923, we find Chagall in his studio, painting his wife Bella, married in Vitebsk in 1915, who will be the essential protagonist of many paintings. It was she who read to him, in French, the Fables of La Fontaine, for which Ambroise Vollard commissioned a new edition from Chagall illustrated in etching in 1927. This work is one of the many projects of illustration of literary texts, which lead Chagall to a new succession of technical experiments, from gouache to black and white. Several stays in Auvergne allow him to capture, in these illustrations, the essence of the French rural landscape.
The large number of gouaches and preparatory states of the engravings testify to the construction in the cyclical elaboration of forms and subjects. The fluidity and spontaneity of the line constitute the artist's signature and it is still with gouache and print that Chagall creates, shortly after, a large number of works dedicated to the circus. This theme of the pictorial tradition offers him an enchanted parenthesis with its bright colors and amusing subjects. Chagall plays with the symbolism with which the circus is invested to better embody his personal vision of the shady future of his people and of Europe, heralded by the first anti-Semitic demonstrations.
Threatening times
Marc Chagall, La chute de l'ange, 1923-1933-1947, huile sur toile, 147,5 x 188,5 cm, collection privée en dépôt au Kunstmuseum Basel, Bâle, Photo © Archives Marc et Ida Chagall, Paris, © Adagp, Paris, 2023
Suddenly, with The Fall of the Angel, an imposing red figure appears on a black background and announces the threat of war and the tragedy of the Holocaust. Constantly vigilant, Chagall captured the dramatic events of his time and, in the three parts of the famous triptych Resistance, Liberation, Resurrection, where he recounts the sufferings of persecution, destruction and exodus, he presents himself as a witness. References to Vitebsk and his personal history are combined with a collective experience represented by the crowd of characters that evoke a wider human community. In this sequence with a strong emotional impact, we unequivocally grasp the evident link established between the events of his time and the subjects treated by Chagall with his pictorial writing of great power.
Biblical subjects (Old and New Testaments) urgently resurface, when the artist declares that he "has to make use of the prophets" – in these unprophetic times – for a truly political purpose. The dramatic use of color, as well as black and white, gives full force to these depictions of tragic events. But beyond the denunciation, the bright and strong colors of these paintings bear witness to both the desire to warn and alert as well as the need to believe in hope and in life.
Discovering New York
The political context, with the establishment of anti-Semitic laws in France and the denaturalisation pronounced by Pétain, forced Chagall into exile in the late 1940s. In 1941 he moved with his wife to New York, like several Russian and Jewish artists and artists. poets who become part of a dynamic artistic and literary community. Coming from Paris, New York, with its skyscrapers and wide avenues, is an impressive, even dizzying metropolis for the Russian artist accustomed to European spaces. But, once again, Chagall recovers in the face of new opportunities in the New World. His fascination with the city and his architecture renews his conception and vision of space, as he had otherwise experienced them in Vitebsk. Following the new New York rhythm, Chagall reconnects with the world of theater and music. In the ballet sets and costumes he produced during this period, the artist freed himself from all constraints, while color now unfolded as an architectural element. The search for him does not neglect the popular expressions that have accompanied him since his youth. Thus he became interested in the popular art and crafts of Mexico, discovered thanks to a working stay in this country, in resonance with a traditional Russian imagery, made available, in New York, by the important immigrant community from his country.
The return to France and the new departures
In 1948, finally, Chagall could imagine a return to Europe. After the war he found a new serenity in his "second homeland", France, where a new generation of artists now forms what is called the "new School of Paris”. Rich in his vast New York and Mexican experience, always in step with the times and eager to surprise the expectations of the European public, Chagall embarks on a new artistic stage oriented towards experimentation. He was then introduced to new techniques and materials, such as watercolor, ceramics, stone, marble, plaster and bronze, which offered him still unexplored means of expression, while at the same time fueling the painter's research on matter and colour, thicknesses and transparencies, as well as on the luminous relationships offered by reliefs and volumes. The exploration of black and white, in these different techniques, allows him to reinvent the more vivid and profound colors that characterize the maturity of his work.
From this large multidisciplinary laboratory, marked by the improvement and constant renewal of color, the primary element of his art, but also by a profound and prolonged reflection on the spatial and architectural values of painting.
Painting of light and matter
Like the creation of large painted or ceramic wall panels, the exploration of mosaics, since 1955, and glass, since 1958, greatly enriches the artist's monumental vision. These techniques allow him to revisit and renew the treatment of matter and light in his work: the translucent ranges and the airy monochromes of the stained glass windows enliven it with a thousand transparencies, while the tesserae of the mosaics correspond to a range of colors it is already luminous material, of which the artist has the utmost freedom, thanks to his profound knowledge of its spatial rendering.
Experimentation is also present in the collage cycles. These surprising paper and fabric compositions are used by the artist as preparatory sketches for monumental compositions, where geometric shapes and bright colors are articulated – from sunny yellow to indigo blue, from magenta pink to absinthe green. This playful and sensorial approach certainly inherits sculpture and ceramics, especially when the artist introduces sand, sawdust or plants onto the support, revealing a vibrant and organic plastic material. Once again the color emerges in free and effervescent forms that seem to reject the spatial limits imposed by the canvas.
Marc Chagall, Le Cantique des Cantiques IV, 1958, huile sur papier marouflé sur toile, 144,5 x 210,5 cm, musée national Marc Chagall, Nice, Dépôt du Center Pompidou, France, Photo © RMN-Grand Palais (musée Marc Chagall) / Adrien Didierjean, © Adagp, Paris, 2023
The biblical message
The itinerary of the immersive exhibition concludes with the 17 monumental compositions that adorn the railings of the Marc Chagall National Museum in Nice, namely the Biblical Message series. Made in the 50s and 60s, these paintings evoke scenes from Genesis and the Exodus, as well as the Song of Songs. The close-ups on the pictorial material allow you to immerse yourself in several decades of experimentation with all the techniques and supports, which in turn nourished painting, the first technique adopted by Chagall. It is transformed and enriched thanks to the study of black and white and shades of gray made possible by the practice of printing and watercolor, the transparencies and reflections of the stained glass windows and monumental mosaics and still working on the thicknesses, reliefs and materials offered from sculpture and ceramics. In these representations of biblical scenes, we also appreciate, once again, the richness of the sources of this cosmopolitan artist, always attentive to the art of his time, who was able to reconcile very different suggestions of ancient, modern and contemporary art, traditional and popular expressions, in a work captivating and one of a kind.
Marc Chagall in New York, 1941, Photo © Archives Marc and Ida Chagall, Paris
