Exhibition
"On the land of the gods. Marc Chagall and the Greek world"

Marc Chagall National Museum

NOVEMBER 16, 2019 - SEPTEMBER 21, 2020

Every day except Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.

"I have never felt anything like what I experienced in this country, where every monument, every ruin carries the viewer's imagination to three thousand years."
Marc Chagall, Interview with Jean Dragon, Nice-Matin, October 30, 1952.

In the early 1950s, Marc Chagall accepted the proposal of his friend the publisher Tériade to illustrate Daphnis et Chloé, a 2nd century pastoral whose work is located on the Greek island of Lesbos.

To soak up the environment of ancient storytelling, Marc Chagall undertook two trips to Greece, in 1952 and 1954. He visited Athens, Delphi, Olympia, Nauplie and the island of Poros. The discovery of these sites acts as a revelation: a new universe opens up to him. The artist finds in Greece the cradle of a civilization that irrigated the entire Mediterranean world, a "land of the gods" that echoes the sweetness of life of the Côte d'Azur where he settled after the war.

Fascinated by the ancient myths and texts associated with the Hellenic land - Daphnis and Chloé de Longus, Homer'sOdyssey - Marc Chagall subsequently produced illustrated books, paintings, gouaches, ceramics, sets and costumes for the Opera, as well as monumental mosaic works.

From a Greece lived to a dream Greece, he appropriates this universe that will nourish his work for the rest of his life.


Police station
Anne Dopffer, Heritage Curator, Director of the 20th Century National Museums of the Alpes-Maritimes
Jean-Baptiste Delorme, Heritage Curator of the Marc Chagall National Museum

Legend: Marc Chagall, Daphnis and Gnathon (detail), illustration for the book Daphnis et Chloé, 1961, lithograph. Special collection. © ADAGP, Paris, 2019.