Marc Chagall, un peintre à la fenêtre

From 26 June 2008 to 13 October 2008
Musée national Marc Chagall, Nice

Starting with his first works, the window played a particularly significant role in Chagall’s painting.
In Paris, from 1910 to 1914, Chagall used windows to bring to life his interior world, showing it behind them, and to assert his own personal vision. Chagall was not alone in this; some of his contemporaries, notably Delaunay, also sought such effects.
Chagall’s paintings have the intimate lighting of family portraits. Following his return to Russia, he developed a different vision of the window, turning it into a link between Nature and human beings.

He continued to depict windows at the beginning of his French period, starting in 1923. Most of the time, the French landscape is revealed through a window. The window itself is not always visible, but the plunging perspective confirms its virtual presence. The window therefore provides a new interpretation of the work, a reading based on form much more than on colour. Indeed, at that time, Chagall had not placed much emphasis on colour.

From the 1930s to the end of Chagall’s career, the window can be considered an intermediate space bridging the fantastic and the phantasmal, the dream world and the world of nightmares. The window is “realistic”, showing an astounding level of descriptive precision; it also becomes a “revisited classic” when it frames a still life.