Centre Pompidou
4 October 2023 - 26 February 2024
Curators
Anne Montfort, curator at the Cabinet d'art graphique, Musée national d'art moderne
and Valérie Loth, curator at the Cabinet d'art graphique.
The exhibition brings together an ensemble of works that joined the collection in 2022 thanks to the generosity of Bella and Meret Meyer. One hundred and twenty-seven drawings, five ceramics and seven sculptures by Marc Chagall have enriched
the Centre Pompidou collection, one of the most representative and extensive
collections of the artist's work, in particular of his pre-war creative output.
These donations have been organised around three themes: preparatory drawings
for the costumes and stage curtains of Igor Stravinsky's "The Firebird" ballet, reprised by the New York Ballet Theater in 1945, sketches and models for the ceiling decorationcommissioned from the artist in 1962, and an ensemble of ceramics, collagesand sculptures made between the 1950s and the early 1970s.
Music plays a fundamental role in Chagall's oeuvre: closely linked to his vocation
as an artist – appearing in his autobiographical account Ma vie – it was both a source of inspiration and a recurrent subject, but most of all it was a new way of thinking of images. Whether Chagall writing "I myself become a sound" or declaring "I have to make the drawing sing through colour", he always associated music closely with the visual arts and maintained an ongoing dialogue throughout his life with the choreographers of his day.
By creating decors and costumes for "The Firebird", Marc Chagall experimented both with large-format painting and blends of materials. From the first drawings, he integrated the very movement of the dancers into his conception of the costumes. In the same way, when he designed the ceiling of the Opéra, he sought a fusion with the architecture of the Palais Garnier, first imagining its composition in terms of coloured rhythms.
Profoundly autobiographical, the resulting iconography is both a homage to the great musicians who accompanied him and to the city of Paris, where he found refuge.
This commissioned work seems to have prompted in the artist a renewed interest in the interplay of materials, whether trying his hand at sculpture, ceramics or including fabrics, lace and papers of all kids in his later collages.
These mature works are representative of Marc Chagall's activity after the Second World War, testifying to his investment in many commissioned projects and the diversification of his practice. They enable us to share the privacy of his studio by showing us the development of a project from the first sketch quickly roughed on a sheet of paper to the finely wrought drawing, both an artwork in its own right and the final stage in the preparation for a painting
Marc Chagall, L’Oiseau de feu, 1945
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle
Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Audrey Laurans/
Dist. RMN-GP
© Adagp, Paris
Marc Chagall, Maquette pour le plafond de l’Opéra Garnier :
Gift of Mme Meret Meyer en 2022
Collection Centre Pompidou, Paris
Musée national d’art moderne - Centre de création industrielle
Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Hélène Mauri/
Dist. RMN-GP
© Adagp, Paris
Marc Chagall, Couple à la chèvre rouge, v. 1970
Gift of Mme Meret Meyer, 2022
Photo: Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI/Janeth Rodriguez-Garcia/
Dist. RMN-GP
© Adagp, Paris
