Chagall Museum Nice

Of any Nice France museum, the Chagall Museum has the most harmony between the building and its collection. The rooms are light, white, and cool, with large windows providing a perfect backdrop of outdoor greenery to the bright pinks and reds of the canvases. Chagall himself designed a stained-glass window for the museum and contributed a mosaic. Chagall was a great lover of music, and the building at times echoes the grandeur of an auditorium.

The seventeen vast paintings in the Chagall Museum Nice are arranged into two groups. The first twelve paintings constitute a cycle, each drawing as its subject a narrative episode recited in the Old Testament. The other five paintings illustrate the Song of Songs, not as a homogenous series, but as five variations on the same theme—love. The artist said of the Chagall Museum Nice that he hoped people would leave having “found a certain peace, a certain religiosity, a feeling of life” and that after seeing the work, viewers would “hear their music and their poetry guided by the heart.”