Nice is described in a Riviera epigram as being ‘rowdy’. Arriving from the Gare Theirs, it appears no more than at best shabby chic. Yet turning away from its immediate centre and climbing streets and steps to the ancient hill of Cimiez takes one quickly to the hidden yet popular gem that is the Musée National Marc Chagall.
A low-slung modernist building by André Hermant set amidst a garden planted with Mediterranean trees - cool colours predominate, which allowed the artist to observe that ‘the colour here is on the inside’ - the Museum sits below the fences and hedges of its boundaries and whispers rather than shouts its existence. Hermant’s conception for the space was that of a ‘house’ in which the balance of forms, natural light, simplicity and serenity of form would provide a congenial setting for the collection of 17 large format paintings inspired by the Bible which Chagall gifted to the French state to found the Museum and which form his Message Biblique.
The combination of Hermant’s house-like conception for the architecture combined with the Biblical content of Chagall’s paintings make this a rather more tangible realisation of a Church-House than the entirely unrealised version which preoccupied Stanley Spencer for many years. Chagall spoke of the museum as a house in his inauguration speech saying, ‘I wanted to leave [the paintings] in this House so that men can try to find some peace, a certain spirituality, a religiosity, a meaning in life.’
These paintings were originally intended for a Calvary Chapel at Vence and were painted between 1958 and 1966. Although the Chapel project eventually fell through, Vence (which was home to Henri Matisse as well as Chagall) still contains a mosaic by Chagall of Moses in the Bullrushes in the baptistry of the Cathedral and the Rosary Chapel designed and decorated by Matisse which he considered to be his masterpiece.
Matisse and Chagall were among leading artists in France involved in the renewal of religious art led by the Dominican Friars, père Couturier and père Régamey. Both had contributed work, at Couturier’s request, to the church of Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce at Assy while Chagall had also been commissioned to create stained glass for several of France’s great cathedral’s as part of their restoration following war damage.
Meditations on religious art had been part of Chagall’s oeuvre from the off due to the place of religion in his Hasidic upbringing in Vitebsk. His commissions for churches, no doubt, also built on discussions about the relations between Judaism and Christianity held when he regularly attended, during his early period in Paris, the Thomist study circle organised by Roman Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at his home in Meuden.
Chagall conceived the idea for the cycle of paintings which became the Message Biblique while working on the Assy commission, although many of the images he used were based on gouaches he had originally created as maquettes for a series of Bible etchings commissioned by the publisher Ambroise Vollard. He described the Bible as a great, universal book and so eventually decided not to hang the paintings in a building associated with one religion, such as the chapel at Vence. Similarly, when undertaking his first church commission at Assy, he wrote on the ceramic Le Passage de la Mer Rouge, ‘In the name of the freedom of every religion.’
On entering the rooms of the Message Biblique - first, the room of Genesis and Exodus, then the Song of Songs - one is struck first by the colours of the works before their content. For each of the Genesis and Exodus paintings Chagall chose a bold, saturated colour suited to his subject - a luminous green for Paradise, deep red for Abraham and the Three Angels, bright yellow for Moses Receiving the Tablets of the Law - and worked in pinks and reds for each of the Songs of Songs paintings. Chagall viewed painting as the reflection of his inner self and therefore colour contained his character and message. In his museum inauguration speech he said, ‘If all life moves inevitably towards its end, then we must, during our own, colour it with our colours of love and hope.’ These are paintings which seek to dream, by their colours and lines, an ideal of fraternity and love.
Chagall wrote of ‘seeing life’s happenings, as well as works of art, through the wisdom of the Bible’ and of trying to express this sense in works ‘shot through with its spirit and harmony.’ So, while the Biblical scene illustrated dominates each of these huge canvases, in the margins, and completing the overall composition, are images of other Biblical scenes and characters, including often the crucified Christ, together with images suggesting the later suffering of the Jewish people. Chagall’s art is one that connects and reconciles disparate images of Bible, experience, history, memory and myth on the canvas through colour and composition.
This sense of Chagall drawing disparate images and styles together and reconciling them on his canvases was a key part of my initial interest in his work so, to be surrounded by these massive statements demonstrating - through content and construction - the potential of religion for reconciliation, was a wonderful and moving experience. That said, the Musée Chagall is primarily a gallery space, and a popular one at that, meaning that time and space for the contemplation which best suits these paintings is at a premium among the crowds and cameras that accompany its position as one of the museums with the highest visitor numbers in the region.
One of the benefits of the decision to locate these paintings in a museum rather than a chapel are the related exhibitions that can be set around the core collection. The current show - Exiles, Reminiscences and new worlds - aims to show how exile inspired many artists, particularly in the first part of the 20th century. Exile was initially a founding experience for Chagall as he set off for Paris in the early 20th century before returning to Russia to marry. Following the Russian Revolution exile became a more permanent experience as he felt forced to leave once again returning initially to Paris but then being exiled to the US as a result of World War II before making his home finally in the South of France.
Migration, voluntary or forced but never indifferent, transformed the vision of artists such as Brancusi, Brauner, Kandinsky, Masson, Miró, Hantaï and Picasso (whose work is shown alongside that of Chagall) and, so the exhibition claims, profoundly altered their art. The exhibition seeks to show how their works were affected by the abandonment of their homeland and their investment in a new country.
The exhibition argues that these are artists whose experience of exile, like that of Chagall, remained linked to a tireless search for the past. Yet the works shown do not seem to bear out that contention as, in composition - primarily the then contemporary styles of abstraction (Kandinsky, Léger, Hantaï etc.) and surrealism (Brauner, Ernst, Lam etc.) - and content, they seem primarily focused on their present. So, Andre Masson’s La Resistance was a contemporary encouragement from exile to those participating in the Resistance while Wols and Jean Hélion focused on close-up’s of contemporary everyday objects and Brauner wrote of letting yourself ‘go forward towards a contemplation of the unknown experience’ because there ‘you find the keys to your eternal doubting.’ Generally, those artists featured here seem to have found that their style of creating fitted their experience of exile and often, as in the Artists in Exile show organised by Pierre Matisse in New York in 1942 (of which Chagall was a part) being feted for doing so. Only in more straitened circumstances, such as Kurt Schwitters painting landscapes of the Lake District for economic reasons during exile in the UK, do we see, in this exhibition, artists changing styles as a result of exile.
Chagall’s work, though, is communal in a way that is less true of many of the other artists featured in the Exiles exhibition and, through his Message Biblique and other similar paintings, he engages with his Jewish heritage from the Exodus through the Pogroms to the Holocaust. Thereby, linking past and present together in experience and understanding. In Chagall’s work exodus and exile are the normal state of the Jewish people and the source of their joys, sorrows, inspirations and insights.
Surprisingly, his key symbol of faith in exile is that of the crucified Christ who featuring centrally or tangentially in numerous of the works shown here. Always visually and accurately a Jewish Christ, nevertheless Chagall uses this image in ways that have real synergy with Christian theology. In ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, for example, the crucified Christ appears above Isaac as the future sacrificial son. Christ becomes the embodiment in Chagall’s work of Israel as the suffering servant; an understanding which culminates in the ‘Exodus’ of 1952 - 1966 where the crucified Christ embraces both the Jews of the Exodus and of the Holocaust.
In these paintings past and present cohere allowing an experience of exile, where personal sorrow is set within a narrative of ongoing faith, to be experienced and felt. This is exile as pilgrimage and it was Chagall’s hope that a visit to the Musée Chagall would be an experience akin to pilgrimage rather than simply being a tourist destination to be visited: "Perhaps the young and the less young will come to this House to seek an ideal of fraternity and love such as it has been dreamed by my colours and my lines."
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