MARC CHAGALL EXHIBITION

18 SEPTEMBER 2021 - 10 JANUARY 2022

"For me, a stained glass window represents the transparent partition between my heart and the heart of the world. Stained glass is exhilarating, it needs gravity, passion. He must live through the perceived light."
Marc Chagall
Citation de Marc Chagall, interview with André Verdet, Chagall méditerranéen, Paris, 1984.

Designed in partnership with the Centre Pompidou-Metz, the exhibition Marc Chagall, the light transmitter explores the importance of light and stained glass in the artist's work. After nearly 30 years of creating stained glass windows, these words of Chagall condense the role that the artist assigned to the art of stained glass: to bring to humanity a message of spirituality and inner light.

Today, 15 buildings, scattered throughout France and around the world, proudly carry the artist's achievements. Through his creations, Marc Chagall intended to offer his contemporaries and future generations images of peace and transcendence. These, rich in abundant iconography, are admirably supported by the emotional strength of its colors and by the changing reflections of the external luminosity.

In full control of his means, Chagall has put all his talent as a colorist and image creator at the service of this demanding technique. The vast majority of its windows, created in the Reims workshops of the master glassmaker Simon-Marq, were made in the tradition of ancestral know-how, practiced with inventiveness by Chagall and his accomplices and friends, Charles Marq and Brigitte Simon. The final touch, made up of the multiple highlights of grisaille that Chagall affixed to the stained glass window to make the material vibrate, offers us all the freedom and generosity of the artist's hand. In return, stained glass allowed him to transcend the material limits of painting by inscribed the changing reflections of light as an intrinsic component of the work.

The Nice exhibition will highlight two exceptional pieces preserved at the Marc Chagall National Museum: the model of the Rose for Metz Cathedral and the stained glass windows of La Création du Monde, designed for the museum's concert hall. In this exceptional place, visitors will have the privilege of discovering the stained glass windows illuminated with a thousand lights in the morning light and then returning in the evening to let themselves be carried away by the music in the concert hall.

Information about http://www.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr