The Emissary of Light
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
21.11.20 → 30.08.21 CHAGALL THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT centrepompidou-metz.fr #chagall La Rose bleue , dite aussi Cruci xion Cruci et rosace de la Moïse, David, JérémieMoïse, © Vitrail de Marc Chagall réalisé en collaboration avec© Didier Charles Boy de la Marq Tour, commande / ADAGP, Paris du Centre 2020 Pompidou-Metz et du Musée National Marc Chagall. Déambulatoire de la cathédrale de Metz : vitrail de DOSSIERPRESS DE KITPRESSE Exposition conçue en partenariat avec le Musée national Marc Chagall, Nice CHAGALL. THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT CONTENTS 1. INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................5 2. MARC CHAGALL .................................................................................7 3. EXHIBITION ITINERARY ......................................................................9 4. CATALOGUE ......................................................................................17 5. PARTNERS........................................................................................18 6. IMAGES AVAILABLE FOR THE PRESS ...............................................25 3 CHAGALL. THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT Marc Chagall en collaboration avec Charles Marq, Déambulatoire nord de la cathédrale de Metz : Moïse et le buisson ardent (détail) © Adagp, Paris 2020 © Didier Boy de la Tour, commande du Centre Pompidou-Metz et du musée national Marc Chagall Cover : Marc Chagall en collaboration avec Charles Marq, Déambulatoire de la cathédrale de Metz : vitrail de Moïse, David, Jérémie et rosace de la Crucifixion, dite aussi La Rose bleue 4 CHAGALL. THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT 1. INTRODUCTION CHAGALL THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT 21 November 2020 to 30 August 2021 Galerie 3 ‘Stained glass is exultant, it demands gravity, and audience. They also provided an ideal framework passion. It lives through our perception of light.’ for his unique vision of the Bible, disconnected Marc Chagall from religious dogma, but which he considered ‘the greatest poetic source of all time.’ From 21 November 2020 to 30 August 2021, the Centre Pompidou-Metz presents an exhibition Undertaken late in his highly prolific career, devoted to Marc Chagall, and the importance of notable for its exploration of diverse media and stained glass windows in his work. techniques, Chagall’s stained glass windows reveal a deeply personal vocabulary that ingeniously Designs and cartoons for windows created for a intertwines the diverse visual cultures that shaped host of buildings, from 1956 to 1984 – in eastern his artistic imagination: the Yiddish voices and France (Metz, Reims, Sarrebourg) and the nearby Biblical incantations of his home city of Vitebsk German city of Mainz, southern France (Nice, (in modern Belorus), and the (more remote) chants Voutezac) and around the world (Israel, the US, and gleaming icons of Russian Orthodoxy; the England, Switzerland) – are gathered and presented avant-garde movements he discovered in Paris; the together with an ensemble of paintings, sculptures, fragmented forms of Cubism, the refulgent colours ceramics and drawings from the collections of the of Fauvism. Chagall reinterprets, transforms, Centre Pompidou, the France’s Musée national and freely combines these numerous influences, Marc Chagall, international institutions and private through the prism of his own life and the histories collections. Exceptionally, the exhibition will feature of the religious and secular buildings for which his a set of original windows from the Chapelle du windows were created. Saillant in the French department of Corrèze, which have been taken down during work to secure the The multiple preparatory sketches that precede building. each stained glass window highlight their creative process as it evolved in collaboration with expert The displays spotlight the history of each commission, glassmakers Charles Marq and Brigitte Simon, the in the context of a wider movement for the renewal heirs and custodians of a tradition rooted in the of sacred art in the aftermath of World War II. family workshop in Reims, founded in the 17th Unexpectedly for an artist whose Jewish roots and century. The exhibition is also a unique opportunity avant-garde leanings seem a priori far removed to observe the reciprocal influences of Chagall’s from the strained glass tradition, the commissions paintings and drawings, and his creations in stained were an opportunity to work on a monumental scale, glass. in architectural settings, and to reach out to a broad 5 CHAGALL. THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT Curator : Elia Biezunski, Head of Mission, assigned to the Director of the Centre Pompidou-Metz Research officer: Bénédicte Duvernay Advisory committee: Elia Biezunski, head of mission, assigned to the director of the Centre Pompidou; Jean-Baptiste Delorme, curator-in- chief, Musée national Marc Chagall; Anne Dopffer, director, Musées nationaux du XXe siècle des Alpes- Maritimes; Bénédicte Duvernay, research officer; Ambre Gauthier, art historian and editor of the catalogue raisonné of the works of Marc Chagall; Nathalie Hazan-Brunet, honorary curator, Musée d’Art et d’histoire du Judaïsme; Emma Lavigne, president, Palais de Tokyo (Paris). Izis (Israëlis Bidermanas) Marc Chagall en collaboration avec Charles Marq travaillant sur le vitrail de La Tribu de Dan, 1961, © Adagp, Paris 2020 Collection Manuel Bidermanas The exhibition has been developed in partnership with France’s Musée national Marc Chagall in Nice, where it will be presented in a revised version from autumn 2021. 6 CHAGALL. THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT 2. MARC CHAGALL (1887 – 1985) Marc Chagall was born in 1887 in Vitebsk, a merchant city of moderate size in a region of Byelorussia annexed to Imperial Russia (now in modern Belorus). Vitebsk was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Tsarist Russia. Chagall was born to a Jewish family in a poor neighbourhood; his father was an employee in a herring warehouse. Chagall attended the local heder (Jewish primary school), before proceeding to the State school of Vitebsk, where classes were taught in Russian. He showed an aptitude for drawing and dreamed of becoming a painter. Chagall left school in 1906. Despite the misgivings of his family (to whom a career as an artist was entirely alien), he enrolled as a student of a young Jewish painter, Jehuda Pen, who had managed to train at the Imperial Academy of Fine Art in St Petersburg. Chagall stayed only briefly in Pen’s studio, and left for St Petersburg in the winter of 1906-7, where he enrolled in a school founded by the Imperial Society for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. He studied subsequently at a private school run by Savel M. Saidenberg, a painter of Russian historical scenes much influenced by the style of Ilia Répine, and later with Léon Bakst, who taught at a liberal arts college, open to more modern forms, and with a particular flair for the use of vivid colour as an expressive medium in its own right. St Peterburg L’Art sacré, n° 11-12, juillet-août 1961. Revue. Éditions du Cerf. was an effervescent centre for the avant-garde, a climate in which Chagall flourished. His discovery He was active in the debate surrounding Cubism of Gauguin dates from this period, for example; and Futurism, both of which clearly influenced his and he steeped himself in the contemporary large-scale compositions of the period. His ability revival of Russian primitivist art. When Bakst left to capture visions of his childhood in Vitebsk, in St Petersburg to work with Diaghilev in Paris, the paintings of Cubist spatial construction and style young Chagall felt a pressing need to leave too. In is striking indeed and testifies – early in his spring 1911, he secured a bursary and travelled to career – to the freedom with which he combines Paris via Berlin. diverse visual cultures in his work. His use of colour, independent of the contours of his figures, and the Chagall visited the city’s galleries and museums – co-existence in the same pictorial space of scenes especially the Louvre – and discovered the work of depicted in very different scales, unconnected avant-garde artists at the Salon d’Automne and the by any discernible narrative, are characteristics Salon des Indépendants, where he also exhibited. developed later, in his stained glass windows. 7 CHAGALL. THE EMISSARY OF LIGHT Chagall returned to Vitebsk in 1914, shortly before Chagall returned to France and settled in Vence outbreak of the First World War. There, he married in 1949. Here, he conceived the idea for a cycle his fiancée, Bella Rosenfeld, the subject of a number of Biblical paintings, to be displayed together in of paintings of this period. Following the October one place. Tapestries and ceramics would complete Revolution, he became a fully-fledged Russian the ensemble, and for the first time, he considered citizen. Furthermore, his project for a school of creating a set of stained glass windows. Movements fine arts in Vitebsk secured the approval of the were afoot for a renewal of sacred art in France, but new regime. Chagall briefly directed a studio at itw as another event in particular that provided his the new academy, before moving to Moscow with first commissions in stained glass : the building of his wife and daughter in 1920. Here, he worked on a new church, Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce, on the theatrical decor and costumes, and painted murals, plateau above the town of Assy on Haute-Savoie. a ceiling and stage curtain for the city’s Russian Jewish Theatre. This intiial incursion into working in glass was just the beginning of a parallel trajectory to his Two years later, he left Moscow for Berlin, but paintings, interrupted only by the artist’s death, quickly returned to Paris, where the publisher and years later: a commission for strained glass windows dealer Ambroise Vollard wanted to commission for the cathedral of Saint-Etienne in Metz, in 1958, him to illustrate livres d’artiste. He deepedn his led him to work with the Simon-Marq workshops knowledge of the culture and landscapes of France, i Reims for the first time, and to his establishment spending time in L’Isle-Adam at the weekend (already internatioanlly famous as a painter), as retreat of Robert and Sonia Delaunay, and in Ault a leading stained glass artist.