Chagall and Matisse in Nice

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Category: WAN Art Blog

Published on Monday, 01 August 2011 01:02

Written by Clare Stein

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Outside the Musée Chagall.

Museums Chagall and Matisse are on the same bus route that winds northeast through Nice, France, from a bustling downtown through the mostly affluent neighborhood of Cimiez.

It is no coincidence that Marc Chagall (1887 – 1985) and Henri Matisse (1869 – 1954), two forefathers of modern art, resided in Nice, and that two museums display their oeuvres. From the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century, Nice boasted an artistic community that flocked to the seaside city for the same reasons so many tourists do today: the sea, the heat, the light and the color.

Matisse once confessed, “When I realized that every morning I would see this light, I couldn’t believe my luck.”

Chagall, too, was inspired by the sunlight and bright tones so vibrantly mirrored in his work: “There, in the south, for the first time in my life, I saw that rich greenness – the like of which I had never seen in my own country.”

Though they lived in Nice at the same time and both held important roles in the same artistic movement, Chagall and Matisse were not great friends, and their artwork does not share great similarities. Fittingly, Musée Chagall and Musée Matisse seek to represent their namesakes in different ways, and the museums follow separate curatorial ambitions.

Buses 22 or 15 will drop you first at the Musée Chagall, inset from the road by a concrete wall and a green lawn. The work of Chagall, a Russian-born artist known as one of modernism’s pioneers and a major Jewish artistic figure, is whimsical, emotive and bold. He adopted motifs of Eastern European Jewish folk culture and absorbed the burgeoning concepts of modernism in his travels between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin as a young man. Dabbling in cubism and other modernist modes, Chagall developed a mostly surrealistic style defined by a repertoire of dream-like motifs.

Musée Chagall is contemporary, with an angular, stern façade of concrete and metal. The building’s interior hinges on sunlight. Slanted windows and recessed ceiling panels create an open, airy atmosphere. Its freshness and simplicity balances the intense color and caprice of Chagall’s paintings, sketches, and mosaics.

In terms of curatorial ambitions, the museum arranges itself thematically. A diverse set of temporary expositions reside in the space, often focusing on a specific medium used by Chagall or a time period in his artistic career, and spotlighting the work of Chagall’s contemporaries as well as artists who were influenced by him. Currently, the museum hosts “La Peinture Autrement,” an exposition of works from the 1980’s onward that considers painting as subject matter, and “Rares Pastels de Marc Chagall,” a collection of Chagall’s works in pastel, including many studies for his “Biblical Illustrations.”

The most impressive of the permanent collection, and what feels like the heart of the museum, are Chagall’s “Biblical Illustrations.” It is a series of twelve large-scale, eye-popping paintings based on scenes from the Old Testament. Next to each painting, the museum displays a placard thoroughly detailing the scene and Chagall’s efforts to capture it.

Chagall, obviously, is not the first artist to paint biblical scenes. However, his renderings are abundantly strange, frequently naïve, and totally unique.  Chagall once said, “I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.”

Musée Chagall may be small, but it makes an impressive effort to synthesize the artist’s religious footing and poetic sensibility through his surrealistic, dream-like lens.

Five minutes further north along the bus route is the Musée Matisse, housed in the seventeenth century Villa des Arènes. The villa, bordered by rows of olive trees and a bright blue summer sky, is intensely Provençal in nature, and resembles something Matisse surely would have painted in his earlier years. Compared to the small, compact Musée Chagall, the Musée Matisse is large and labyrinthine, with several levels and an expansive layout. While the Musée Chagall has a limited collection, the Musée Matisse houses an impressive number of the artist’s works.

The artistic career of Matisse is difficult to characterize. Matisse’s paintings began in a traditional vein, progressed to impressionism, and continued to evolve through fauvist, neoclassical, and abstract phases. Perhaps because of these stylistic transformations, the Musée Matisse can feel confusing or overwhelming.

The Musée Chagall takes a thematic approach, while the Musée Matisse seeks to present a more biographical retrospective. Photographs, documents, and even furniture that belonged to the artist punctuate the large collection. In a theater inside Musée Chagall, a detailed and well-produced biographical documentary on the artist plays throughout the day. The film is long, and most people probably do not sit through the whole thing. At Musée Matisse, the presence of biographical remnants is synthesized with the artistic collection, and works to provide coherence.

Despite the biographical context, the dramatic evolution of Matisse’s work could be explained more lucidly. An uninformed viewer might doubt, even, that the same artist produced both the delicately rendered early paintings and the bold, expressive cut-out series. The museum might benefit from a re-organized layout or more explanatory placards. On the other hand, the work speaks for itself.

His cut paper collages, or gouaches découpés, particularly communicate the continuity of his vision. Created during the period after he was diagnosed with cancer in 1941 and lasting virtually until his death in 1954, the pieces exude Matisse’s creative rebirth and the creative energy that surged from what he called “la seconde vie” (second life). The cutouts are a dramatic departure from earlier work, but they continue to address the movement of bodies and the expressive impact of color and light.

The current exposition at Musée Matisse, “The Dissolution of Line and Colour,” is a study in Matisse’s exquisite and expressive use of light, line, and color, to represent, in many cases, the bright scenes and figures of the French Rivieria. Matisse, while living in Nice, perfected a certain fluidity in his depictions of water, sky, and bodies.

If Chagall’s work is the stuff of dreams, Matisse worked from daydreams: all slightly hazy, imbued with emotion, but still lucid, rooted to reality. It’s a treat to visit these museums located in the same place the artists worked, like monuments to their inspiration. And you can take the bus.

All photographs by Clare Stein.

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