A special exhibition of works by the renowned artist Marc Chagall, focusing on the artist’s connection with circus life, has been launched at a French museum to mark the 20th anniversary of his death.

The display, which is being shown at the Musee National Message Biblique Marc Chagall in Nice, includes 16 paintings and 36 drawings united around the theme of the circus.

Chagall’s son, David MacNeil, who opened the exhibition on 2 July, said the circus world always fascinated his father. “I have always considered clowns, acrobats and dancers as looking like personages of some religious paintings,” he said.

Allegorical representations

MacNeil noted that Chagall saw circus folk as the perfect example of artists who desire to be loved and achieve their dreams. He identified himself with these people and the representations he made of them can be seen as self-portraits.

Jean-Michel Foray, director of the Museum, added: “Contrary to many artists, circus is for Chagall a happy world. For him circus is a kind of happy promise.”

Foray said that he believed the circus figures are allegorical. He said: “It allowed him to be a painter-observer. That’s why his paintings are not really connected with war events. Painting was for him a way to escape reality. But always with happiness and joy.”

Chagall’s works presented by the Nice Museum are from national museums and private collections, some of them never shown before.

Distinguished career

Known for his surrealistic inventiveness, Marc Chagall is recognized as one of the most significant painters and graphic artists of the 20th century.

Profil rouge au sapin

Huile sur toile Private collection © Adagp, Paris 2005

Born Moishe Zakharovich Shagalov in Vitebsk, Belarus (then in the Russian Empire), on July 7, 1887, Chagall was the eldest of a nine-child Hassidic Jewish family.

Very early on he was encouraged by his mother to follow his vocation. He began to study painting in 1906 under a famed local artist and joined a St Petersburg art school in 1907.

In 1910 he settled in Paris to be near the art community and changed his name to Chagall, which was “more French sounding”, and for years later he exhibited his first collection at the Der Strum gallery in Berlin.

His long career included the directorship the Moscow Jewish State Theater, as well as creating numerous Jewish themed art pieces including the famous stained glass windows in the synagogue of the Hadassah University Clinic in Jerusalem

Chagall died in Saint-Paul de Vence, near Nice, in 1985, at the age of 98.

The Musee National Message Biblique Marc Chagall, which opened in 1973, was created as an opportunity for Chagall to gather together his most important work in a single place.


Saltimbanques“Les cirques de Chagall” exhibition is open until 3 October 2005 at the Musee national Message Biblique Marc Chagall, Avenue Docteur Menard in Nice, France.
Phone: +33-4-93-53-87-20. The Exhibition is open every day, except Tuesdays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
www.musees-nationaux-alpesmaritimes.fr or www.rmn.fr